I almost wish I had read it in one sitting, to really be immersed in that feeling. The novel feels oppressive, a bit frenzied, evoking a feeling as if you’ve had a sunstroke and your mind is repeatedly going over the same five thoughts. I think she did take it too far, but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it. And again, until I find myself wondering whether maybe Taddeo had taken it a tad too far, exaggerated too much. One of the core issues that Animal explores is the way that men can ruin lives without a care, to get what they want. After this traumatic event, she decides to drive from New York to California, looking for a woman named Alice, who she thinks can help her unravel her past. Joan has just witnessed a man shooting himself in a crowded restaurant, where she was eating dinner with her lover, a married man. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.

Seductive and relentless, Animal draws readers closer to Joan and the brutal mystery of her past, holding them captive until the very last page.The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. In a haunting, visceral novel of women surviving men, Lisa Taddeo has produced one of the most compelling anti-heroines in fiction.

It's here, consumed by a familial trauma that slips through the generations, that she finds herself part of a disparate LA community, while coyotes roam the sweltering hills above the city, poised for the scent of fresh blood. Reeling from the public suicide of a former lover, Joan abandons her apartment in New York and drives west for California, in search of the one person who might help her unravel the past. She knows men, too - their penchant for cruelty, the violence she has absorbed over decades that now threatens to burst from her own hands. He did it in a restaurant where I was having dinner with another man, another married man.ĭo you see how this is going? But I wasn't always that way.Īt thirty-six, Joan knows more than most of the price of pleasure, the quotidian horror of being a woman at the mercy of a man. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig. I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me.

Animal by lisa taddeo review