A rural romance quickly goes south for the winter in A GOOD ANIMAL. Debut novelist Sara Maurer’s fresh voice in fiction challenges the tropes of shy high school students coming of age and finding love. Pop culture icons like Peter Parker have created a sense that young introverts who lack self-esteem, identity and romance are always well-intentioned and selfless. Maurer’s intimate character development weaves selfishness and harmful impulse into this stereotype within a vivid, midwestern setting.

Everett Lindt and his best friend, Charlie, spend the summers of their high school years harvesting hay. Before their senior year, Kylie, the daughter of the boys’ landowning employer, begins bringing them lunch for their afternoon break. Kylie has a crush, but not on Everett, who is used to being an apostrophe. Everett is known around town as his father’s son or Charlie’s friend. Even his name belongs to his grandfather. But he finds himself with a crush when Kylie’s new friend, Mary, isn’t impressed with Charlie, who mockingly asks if she’s tired of seeing the Buffalo Bills lose Super Bowls. She fires back, reminding him of the local Detroit Lions’ worse woes.

"A GOOD ANIMAL is a great debut in the broad world of fiction and a solid recommendation for romance fans. It is unconventional and unique, but those who enjoy love stories will get their fill of flawed and likable characters attempting to uncover their identities through each other."

While Everett and Mary’s relationship is at the center of A GOOD ANIMAL, Maurer showcases the Lindts’ farm and family throughout. Everett is dreading the day that his little sister learns the fate of her favorite sheep (the Lindts raise sheep to auction them off to meat packers). If a sheep displays an undesirable trait, Everett says “you didn’t show” to waste bidders’ time. When describing the intrinsic feeling needed to raise a prize-winning sheep, he claims, “You couldn’t have a grand champion unless you loved it.” His instructional, second-person tone within the first-person narration makes readers feel the generations of the Lindt family business. Unsurprisingly, Maurer cites a childhood spent on farms with sheep and other animals as her inspiration.

At the Chippewa County Fair, Everett can’t bear his sister’s tears for her favorite sheep, so he bids and wins the auction just so she’ll be happy. This public act of love attracts Stacy Harris, a beauty pageant queen and staple of the fair. Everett is elated when he dances with Stacy in front of Charlie, who had hogged every girl’s attention; Kylie, who never batted an eye at him; and Mary, who rejected him when he asked her out. While Stacy and Everett are hooking up, she calls him “Sheep Boy,” and he sours. He realizes that he is still more attracted to Mary, who had called him by his name and even pronounced it properly.

Maurer moves A GOOD ANIMAL through the people in Everett’s life, and she bridges the characters and story through farm work. After going separate ways with Stacy, Everett wanders the fairgrounds and stumbles on Mary. Charlie and Kylie were tired of having a third wheel and left Mary alone. Everett offers her a ride home in his truck, showing an authentic anger toward the way she was abandoned. This is where Maurer puts their romance in drive, and it’s the last time Everett would put Mary’s needs before his. For the rest of the novel, he serves his own desires and feels that his love for her is automatically good.

Everett displays a real interest in Mary’s background and hopes for the future. She never felt cared for by her mom, who walked out, or her apathetic dad. She loves to draw and plans to attend an art school in California after graduation, which is a constant source of tension. Everett doesn’t want her to leave him but fails to consider that following her passion is what’s best for her. Instead, he laments how she won’t stay with him in Michigan raising sheep.

Before they begin having sex, Everett’s narration foreshadows his regret. Knowing their immediate futures don’t converge, he wishes light romance was all they had before sex entangled their feelings twofold. Most of the narrative feels like young Everett going from Point A to Point B within his present time in the ’90s, but sometimes Maurer lets his adult voice seep through to hint at what would happen in the near future.

A GOOD ANIMAL is a great debut in the broad world of fiction and a solid recommendation for romance fans. It is unconventional and unique, but those who enjoy love stories will get their fill of flawed and likable characters attempting to uncover their identities through each other. But, as in life, a good thing can be soured by selfish choices, the implications of which make the book enticing to reread to discover hidden foreshadowing.