Literary fiction tends to tackle all sorts of difficult subjects with skilled authors offering readers tales that provoke and somehow still entertain. Emeline Atwood achieves this delicate balance in her brave and fantastic debut novel, A REAL ANIMAL, a story of violence and yearning. 

The book opens with its protagonist, Lucy, naked in a tree on her college campus, believing herself to be a leopard. This is a delayed psychological reaction to a horrific experience the summer before, but neither she nor the reader connects the two immediately. This trauma, compounded by her complicated relationship with her mother, begins a pattern of sexual violence confused as love that plays out across her early 20s. Even before the leopard incident, she spends her senior year sleeping with all of her boyfriend’s best friends. 

"This unforgettable first work is visceral, fearless, relentless and confrontational. Lucy’s story is heartbreaking and terrible, singular and mundane, and honestly rendered."

After graduation, Lucy finds herself in a long-term abusive relationship with an older man named Ellis. Not only is Ellis violent, he convinces her to sleep with strangers who also can be violent with her. Still, Lucy does have moments of peace and clarity in her time with Ellis. When the couple travels to Hawaii to scuba dive, she discovers a talent for the sport and a sense of wonder and ease underwater. 

Throughout the novel, Lucy’s most important tie is to her sister, Patty, but that is knotted either too loosely or too tightly. She loves Patty but worries about her too much. Lucy struggles in her friendships with other women as well, pushing against them when she longs to pull them closer. 

Later, after fleeing Ellis, Lucy is in a healthier relationship with Liam. He is a kinder man and generally responsive to her emotions. Still, readers see before Lucy does the ways in which he fails to really hear her and how he dismisses her. All of her unresolved issues make it nearly impossible for her to settle into a normal give and take with Liam or to be comfortable with his family. When her unpredictable mother dies, lingering questions and unmet needs bring her back to her childhood home, where she and her sister try to decide what to do with the house. And, once again, the wildness of the world calls to Lucy as an escape from reality and pain.

The times when Lucy finds herself connected to nature are few and far between but are all the more powerful because of that. These are revelations but also transformations, spiritual and perhaps psychotic, and ultimately unexplained by Atwood. In these natural or animal moments, Lucy’s humanity --- sorrowful, wounded and ever hopeful --- is on full display. This darkness in the story, as well as the threads of light woven through it, is brilliant. 

This unforgettable first work is visceral, fearless, relentless and confrontational. Lucy’s story is heartbreaking and terrible, singular and mundane, and honestly rendered. Atwood’s prose is rich, and the novel is cleverly crafted and interestingly organized, revealing Lucy’s life in compelling ways page by page. A REAL ANIMAL is gorgeous, frightening and highly recommended.