Sarah O'Connor

CW: Animal abuse.

“How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream,” (Yoder 161).

One day a mother becomes convinced she is turning into a dog. Her teeth are sharper, there’s hair on the back of her neck, and what is that really just a cyst at the base of her spine? She watches over her two-year-old son full-time while her husband is away on business trip after business trip, finding herself alone and obsessing over her newfound canine qualities.

God Nightbitch was everything I’d hoped it would be and more. I know most reviews already call it a mash-up of Mona Awad’s Bunny and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis but it really is the best comparison, the combination of two icon stories into one amazing novel. I loved what it had to say about motherhood, especially modern motherhood. I loved how this book surprised me with it’s characters, with where it was going, and how Yoder could have easily gone for a more traditional and expected route but really did keep it modern. The book just feels fresh, it feels new and changing, and while it’s similar to Bunny and The Metamorphosis it’s also it’s own beautifully unique story that I just can’t get out of my head.

Honestly I enjoyed Nightbitch so much and really thought it would be a five star read, but while I can handle a lot of gore in my horror I just can’t handle anything bad happening to cats. I had a hard time with just the mentioning of cats drowning in Emily of New Moon and that one scene in Nightbitch just upset me too much that I had to take away a star. There also isn’t any quotation marks when characters are talking to one another, which I was able to figure out eventually but did make it confusing at times especially because quotation marks are used in other areas of the book.

I don’t want to say too much aside from the actual premise because Nightbitch is truly a book to be experienced, to be devoured by it’s reader’s.

Publication: July 20th 2021
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Pages: 256 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Horror, Humour, Literary, Magical Realism
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

“One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else…
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined – what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.
Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice…”