'I’m pregnant with an owl-baby. Everyone is a little bit repelled by me. Everyone is a little bit uncomfortable.'

Chouette is a visceral contemporary fairy tale about difference, acceptance, and the epic blood-and-guts struggles of child-rearing. I could say I devoured this book in a day… but it would be more accurate to say this book devoured me.

I’m not a parent, and as a general rule, I find novels about motherhood unappealing. They tend to be either too cloyingly sentimental, or they are written in an obviously targeted way, conveying nuggets of wisdom or winking humour clearly intended for an ‘in the know’ reader, ie mothers. Both of these approaches leave me unable to connect.

Not only does Chouette NOT do these things, it’s the first time a novel has really conveyed to me—not on an intellectual level, but on a deeply emotional one—the experience of falling desperately in love with your child to the point of devoting your whole self to them. Love that is strenuous and asymmetrical and importunate. Motherhood that is cacophonous and mucky and jubilant. Sharp claws and soft feathers.

'One day you won’t need me, Chouette. It’s only natural. The day will come when you feast upon my liver and fly away, leaving the rest of me for the scavengers. It’s a wonder that any woman ever agrees to be a mother, when the fruits of motherhood are inevitably conflict and remorse, to be followed by death and disembowelment.'

I loved this book. I loved its conviction, its ferocity, its bravery, and its humour. One of this year’s best for sure. 5 stars.

I’m not sure what made me request this book but the synopsis promised a very strange, unsettling read and as I’m sure you know by now, there are few things I love more on long, dark nights.

Tiny is a pregnant cellist and her husband is thrilled with the news but he doesn’t know that the baby isn’t his. This baby belongs to Tiny’s owl-lover and she is pregnant with an owl-baby. When the baby is born, she is small and broken. Tiny is left to care for her unique daughter, who she names Chouette, and she is determined to nourish and celebrate her baby’s true self. But Chouette has a penchant for violence and disturbing behaviour and Tiny’s husband is determined to find a ‘cure’ for his daughter. Can Tiny come round to his way of thinking or will she continue allowing her daughter to embrace her owlish identity?

The very first page let me know that this was going to be a very strange, memorable read. Both the magical realism and the queer elements are introduced straightaway and I spent the rest of the book trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. I was sure that the whole thing was a metaphor for something and I had a great time figuring that out.

Tiny doesn’t fit in with her husband’s family and this only intensifies when Chouette comes along. There is a lot of bird imagery throughout the book but her mother-in-law rescues injured birds, so it is very strong in these scenes. I wasn’t exactly sure of the particular significance of this but perhaps it alludes to the suggestion that even amongst other broken birds, neither Tiny nor Chouette belong.

Of course, the overriding theme of the book is motherhood and its impact on the woman its bestowed upon. Tiny talks about the pain and stress that comes with raising a child like Chouette while maintaining how in love she is with her daughter. I know that this is exactly how so many mothers feel, even those who aren’t raising a child with challenging behaviour. Caring for a newborn is all-consuming and can completely reshape the mother’s life, which is exactly what Chouette is all about.

Tiny and her husband’s main source of conflict is over how to raise Chouette. Tiny wants to fully embrace her innate animal instincts while her husband is desperate for a ‘normal’ child. This was a really interesting argument to follow because I could see the merit in both sides. When you see how destructive Chouette can be, it’s obvious why her father would want to stop that but of course, everyone should be able to express who they naturally are. Again, I wasn’t sure exactly what Chouette really was -whether she was literally part owl or whether she’s severely disabled- so it was hard to decide which side of the debate I fell on.

Towards the end, the book gets quite philosophical and perhaps it always was but this is where it becomes most clear. The nature vs nurture questions are thrown around and explored in Tiny’s troubled mind and it makes for some interesting thinking. The ending is a satisfying one albeit heartbreaking for Tiny. However, I felt that she had come a long way since she fell pregnant and I had hope for her beyond the pages of her life that I got.

Chouette is a very visceral, haunting and disturbing read that I won’t be forgetting in a hurry. The writing is quite lyrical and the descriptions flip between incredibly graphic and ambiguous, so it felt like a light was flickering the whole time I was reading. I was kept in the dark enough to form my own opinions but was also treated to a healthy dose of bizarre bloodthirst too. Very thought-provoking and strange, Chouette can only be described as an unforgettable story of motherhood and its life-changing effects.

In a Nutshell: This is, by far, the weirdest book I have ever read in my life! But I still found it though-provoking, and to a certain extent, I liked the questions it raised.

Story: (Golden Rule for this story synopsis and everything else that follows: don’t question any content with ‘How is that possible?’ I have no answers.)
Tiny has had a one-time dalliance with her secret owl lover. (I know…I get ya…read on.) She is now pregnant, and is a hundred per cent sure that her baby is an owl-baby, something her husband only sees as one of the mental side-effects of pregnancy. When Chouette is born though, Tiny is proved correct. Small and predatory, Chouette proves to be a very difficult owl-baby who functions as per her own adamant demands. But Tiny is a mother, and she vows to do the best she can to make her child happy, even if it means going against her husband and the rest of the world, and even if she ends up bloodied and bruised by her screeching child. (Yup, screeching, not screaming.) When her husband decides that he wants to seek a “cure” for their child, the time comes for Tiny to make tough decisions.
The story is written in the first person perspective of Tiny. Here’s one line said by Tiny to Chouette midway the story, and it best represents the essence of the book:
“Here’s the crux of it, owl-baby. Your father wants to fix you, and I want us to love you as you are.”


As is very evident, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill story. The entire content can best be viewed as metaphorical. Only this way can you make sense of what’s happening in the story. I am so stumped about how to review it because my usual reviews have a clear structure. For a book that is entirely unstructured, I have no idea how to proceed. So here I go with a list of random thoughts that come to my mind when I think of this book. (If you think my review is confusing, wait till you read the book!)


👉 This is a very short book, just a little more than 200 pages. So it’s a decently quick read. You won’t be able to whoosh through it though. The content doesn’t allow that. As Tiny herself says, she has “undiluted thoughts spiralling out of control.” And we are the ones reading those thoughts. So it’s almost stream of consciousness in its style at times.

👉 The writing is so beautiful though. I could go on and on pasting the various passages I highlighted. Some are hilarious while others are poignant. One of my favourites was “Housekeeping is nothing more than a losing encounter with entropy.” How true is that!

👉 The title “Chouette” means “owl” in French. There is a fair bit of French content in the book but not so much as will hinder your comprehension. For me, it worked as a nice way of testing my rudimentary French skills.

👉 I don’t know what genre to put this book under: horror, fantasy, magical realism, literary fiction, psychological drama, gory thriller… It has bits of all of these.

👉 This is by no means an easy read. Especially in the first 40% or so, the content is so meandering and absolutely random in its arcs that I kept wondering where the heck this book was going.

👉 Some of the adjectives that came to my mind as I progressed with the book: disturbing, weird, gory, shocking, weird, funny, sad, bizarre, tense, weird, hopeful, devastating,… did I say weird?

👉 I'm a very visual reader so I really struggled to picture the owl baby and the owl lover. How I wish this were an illustrated book!

👉 The metaphors within the narrative:
- Tiny’s story can be seen as a metaphor on the difficulties of parenting and motherhood. It also rises the themes of social conformity and acceptance, adherence to social norms rather than retaining your individuality, and fitting in predefined standards. (In a way, it seems to question the entire educational system that remoulds every individual imaginative thinker into a generically required skillset.)
- Do we need to conform to societal expectations in order to lead happy lives? At the same time, is it possible to survive in society by being a total non-conformist? Tough questions with no easy answers. But I liked the metaphor used by the author for these two elements. The nonconformists were ‘owls’ – wild & individualistic - and the conformists were ‘dogs’ – tame and loyal. (As I love dogs and owls, I felt torn between the two similes.)
- Chouette’s arc can also be seen as a metaphor for children with extreme mental disorders and how parents and others struggle to behave with such kids, who don’t deliberately behave outrageously but it is how they are.

👉 The parenting issues:
- Tiny’s character is a tough one to process. There are shades of various emotional problems: a bit of PTSD, a bit of under-confidence, a bit of melancholia, a bit of defensiveness,… You will root for her and yet dislike her adamant insistence of doing everything single-handedly for Chouette. Kind of like a helicopter parent, who means well but ends up destroying the child’s independent development.
- As the story comes from the mother’s perspective, it is very easy to say that this is a commentary on the extent to which mothers can go for their children, “In extremis”, as the blurb declares. But the role of Chouette’s father in this story is equally crucial. He stands for all that is straightforward and within societal norms. He wants the best for his daughter, so as to ensure a happy future for her after her parents are no longer alive. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. A part of me felt very sorry for him, especially as I know most readers will consider his character the villain of the story. But as a parent, I sympathised more with him than with Tiny. He stood by his wife and daughter during the worst of times and didn’t give up on them. He deserved a greater credit for his intentions, even if they didn’t always work out to plan.

👉 The ending is open to your interpretation. While I don’t mind open endings as long as they are well-written, in this case I was a bit disappointed. The end left me with many questions, and didn’t provide a closure to many queries raised earlier in the book. Such as the childhood of Tiny and what connection she had to birds earlier. How and why did she break away from owls to attach herself to a dog family? I can see book clubs debating over multiple points in this book and that ending. But I would really have enjoyed things to be tied together more neatly at the end.

Overall, Chouette is a metaphorical dilemma of wanting what's best for your child versus making your child fit in what society wants from it. It is a mentaly tiring and emotionally exhausting experience to read this story. And even after you complete it, you can’t be entirely sure of what you just read. All the above points are based on my interpretation of this highly subjective narrative. You will definitely derive your own exposition of the story.
I usually try to provide recommendations about who might enjoy the reviewed book best. This time, I have nothing to say. I simply don’t know what category of readers will enjoy this. So I will speak to you as an individual.
Would you enjoy a book that will provide you with a more visceral experience than an intellectual one, one that is more metaphysical than physical, one that doesn’t give you answers but raises many questions? You may try “Chouette”.
Would you love a story with a beautifully tied-together ending, a direct commentary on the difficulties of parenting, a solution to the problems raised, a literal book that says what it means and means what it says? “Chouette” may not click with you.
Those who are sensitive about gore or animal abuse would do well to avoid this book.

I have been dilly-dallying between 3 and 4 for this book. As far its themes go, it is a certain 4 for me. But because of that open ending, the gory content, and the abundant number of oddities in the tale (which might work well for some readers but weren’t really my cup of tea – I’m more of a dog than an owl, regardless of what my profile pic says!), my rating settles at 3.25 – “I liked it”.


My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK and NetGalley for the ARC of “Chouette”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

Chouette is a highly original yet deeply disturbing debut novel which explores the wilder side of motherhood. It’s definitely not my usual kind of book, and I don’t remember what led me to request it - a mention in one of my Facebook groups perhaps. It’s more literary than the genres I usually pick, and the whole thing is like an exquisitely vivid bad dream. Did I enjoy it? Not much. Would I recommend it? Yes if you’re into contemporary dark magical realism, and are either a secure & happy mother, or child-free.

Tiny is a professional cellist from California who is happily married to a steady patent lawyer. When she discovers that she is pregnant, she warns her husband that she is carrying an Owl-baby, and initially she is desperate to terminate it, but he is thrilled at the prospect of finally becoming a father, and she is convinced to continue. Then the baby is born and while everyone else sees a child with significant abnormalities, Tiny embraces her role as Chouette’s mother with horrifying glee, determined to allow her to be herself, red in tooth and claw…

3-star reviews are always the hardest to write. My rating has to reflect MY feelings, but I don’t want to put off readers who might love it. It’s quite short - about 250 pages/ 3 hours, beautifully written if you don’t mind the second person present narrative style, and easy to read apart from the frequent descriptions of the deaths of small animals - including several pets - animal lovers beware.
Like most literary fiction, it’s open to interpretation - I’m generally not good at this part which is why I generally avoid it. There’s the typical open ending, and I’m sure there’s lots that went over my head. Others have commented on the random insertion of French words and phrases, this didn’t bother me as I’m reasonably fluent in that language, but it would’ve annoyed me if I were not.

The subject of how a mother can love an unloveable child has featured in two of the most controversial books I can remember reading - We need to talk about Kevin, and Baby Teeth/Bad Apple. It’s such a taboo topic that it takes a brave female author to go there. Is Tiny mentally ill, or is this all fantasy, or allegory? You could read it any way you like. Is she right, in her fierce determination to protect her child’s uniqueness, including from her bewildered husband’s obsessive quests to “cure” their daughter of her problem? Or is she the abuser, Chouette surviving in spite of rather than because of what most would see as very strange parenting. This is certain to be a popular choice for book clubs everywhere and will polarise readers just as those two books did. It’s certainly not for everyone, and I recommend reading a range of reviews before deciding whether to commit. I look forward to seeing what my other book-buddies think of it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown UK for the ARC. I am posting this honest review voluntarily.
Chouette is available for kindle now and in hardback on November 16th.

Chouette is a weird and darkly compelling book about motherhood and caring for a child who doesn’t fit into society’s norms. I found myself trying hard to work out what was “really” going on, but soon gave up that impossible task and relaxed into the strange other-owl-world of the novel.

A novel of fierce love, music, exhaustion and understanding between a mother and daughter.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

A book I found fascinating and flew through in all honesty, but definitely not a book for everyone.

Following the pregnancy and birth of an owl-baby to a seemingly normal American family, this entire novel is an exposé on what it means to be a mother and what it means to have a child that the world would define as other.

Due to the metaphorical nature of the entire book, with fictional medical terms that describe the metaphor that is this strange baby it is a novel steeped in everything that is unsaid and left to be decided by the reader. The metaphorical nature of the book was also mimicked in the manner of speak portrayed by the main character, Tiny, the mother of Chouette. Her thoughts are often disjointed and foggy as she blurs the lines between reality and fiction, using imagery to describe her day-to-day life with her baby. With jumps between the past and present and the flow of years in a single chapter, the reading of the novel becomes just as confusing as the characters seem to be. There is a weightless, timeless feeling while reading the novel, a feeling of floating as there are no dates and specific times to ground you at any point.

The stark differences between the family of Tiny’s husband, who goes unnamed throughout the book projecting a universality onto him as a father figure, and Tiny herself is telling when it comes to her feelings about them. Tiny’s husband and his focus on protecting his child, “fixing her” and having a child that can integrate into society is a major plot point and point of strain in this small family.

The writing of this short novel was dense and orchestral in style; this style was reflected in the thoughts of Tiny, as she was a professional cellist and incorporated snippets of classical pieces into her daily life and her experience of the world. With relatively few paragraphs and chapters, which were decidedly long dominating the page, the thoughts and feelings of all the characters became convoluted and difficult to distinguish from one another, once again bringing home the confusion the appearance of the baby has created in the lives of her mother and father and the rest of the world.

A book that was a metaphorical look at a what a disabled baby does to the dynamics of a family as well as the metaphor of the feelings a mother has to contend with when she brings a life into the world.

Although I enjoyed the book, puzzling out the hidden meanings behind the medical syndromes Tiny’s husband finds and tries to cure through many trips to the “specialists”, I must acknowledge and warn readers that this is not for everyone. This is a book that will suit your tastes if you are interested in a slightly spooky read, that leaves you unsettled and wondering when you put it down and looking at your phone to confirm a suspicion about the veiled meaning of the sentence Tiny has uttered or the classical piece she hears when confronted with an unpleasant part of life.

Although well written and well thought out, I do not recommend this to anyone who likes a more straightforward read, or an “easier” read where you can switch off and just enjoy a good story. This is a book that was designed to make you think about the meaning of the love a family has for a disabled child, a mother’s instinct when looking after a child and the eternal binding a mother has to this child after their birth. It also has you thinking about casual cruelty, the human fear of the other and the all-encompassing desire of a mother to protect her baby from the tragedy of the world.

My two stars are not for the book itself, which is well written and well thought, but simply because it’s not my cup of tea. I wouldn’t purchase it and honestly I wouldn’t know who to recommend it to.

I found it utterly disturbing and unnecessarily unsettling, it takes the whole dark fable allegory a step too far.
I found it incredibly difficult to empathise with the characters, their faults make them irritating and ridiculous and for the entire book I just wanted to scroll everyone by their shoulders and tell them to get a grip and pull themselves together.

Motherhood, which is meant to be the main topic of this novel, is depicted almost like this astonished stupor, as if Tiny entered a sort of trance and she’s unable to wake up.
Her husband and his perfect all-American family are quite bland, you don’t root for them but you don’t blame them either for being so uptight and narrow minded.

I finished this book passively, with no particular interest in how it was going to end and what was going to happen to Tiny, Chouette or the father.

If you’re interested in the eerie and weird, you might give this book a try – but be ready for a strong journey.

Extraordinary and absorbing. I've never read anything like it in my life!

Thank you Little, Brown and Net Galley for the eARC.

Intriguing concept, well written and very enjoyable if a little dark. Will be recommending and will purchase on publication - I thought this was excellent.

I'm still not quite sure what I thought about this book, even after finishing it. It's clever and thought-provoking and very visceral, but sometimes it got a little too strange for me.

An unusual, and at times disturbing tale about motherhood, Chouette is a frustrating read - not in a negative way, but more in a surreal, and also gaslighting kind of way.

Tiny is pregnant, and immediately convinced that her baby is an 'owl-baby', that her female owl lover came to her in the night and they created this hybrid child. Her husband is unimpressed by this when she tells him, implying her mental health is involved, and when Tiny does give birth to the creature she saw in her mind's eye, a lot of dark and weird follow.

There is a disturbing downward spiral in the behaviour of the husband and then later his family towards Tiny, raging from gaslighting, control, abuse, isolation, and I found it quite uncomfortable to read the longer this went on for her.

The book really captures the isolation and alienation a new mother can feel, and the strangely liminal change within yourself, like the point when Tiny accepts her child fully and unconditionally, yet the husband is almost hysterically searching for a cure.

The 'owl-baby' can be taken as a metaphor for disability, illness or deformity; the father sickeningly wishes that the child will pass away when he first sees it, and then spends all his energy on finding 'cures' which become more and more depraved until he virtually has her lobotomised..

It's very difficult subject matter to read but also viscerally emotive, you feel for Tiny and this baby, even when they are tearing animals and people to pieces.

You spend a lot of time trying to understand whether this book is a story about a mother with mental illness losing her grip on reality (the husband keeps referring to her fears about her unborn baby being an 'owl-baby' as though it is something that has happened before), or about a child with a disability or genetic condition, or whether it is magical realism and abstract at play. It's one that keeps you thinking throughout, and is hard to stop thinking about afterwards.

This is a weird little book,and it's meant to be.
But it's also a tad confusing for those of us who don't do deep thinking stuff. I take it as I find it,and I'm not sure what I found here.
Very strange,but also very easy to get drawn into the story.
I picked up every time with enthusiasm,just can't explain it!!

A readable, but very strange story. I guess it is a story of mother love under extreme circumstances.

Thank you so much for letting me review this amazing book! I absolutely loved the characters and the story! Had me hooked from the very beginning! I couldn't put the book down! I highly recommend this book to enjoy!!! You will love it too!

The best way I can describe my experience of reading Chouette is that it set up a sort of triangle of different possible interpretations and then played in that triangle with ideas about motherhood and acceptance.

First the triangle. Is this book a fantasy/magical realism tale about an owl-baby, is it a story about a baby with some kind of genetic condition or is it a story told though the eyes/words of a woman struggling to keep a grip on reality. Or is it some combination of these? Or does it slide between and among them as the story progresses?

Secondly the ideas. Our narrator is Tiny and the book begins as she realises she is pregnant. She believes the baby is the result of a coupling with an owl:

"I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant.
You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?

I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman."

Thinking about my mental triangle, this could be fantasy, this could be a woman mis-seeing reality because she can’t handle it. Once the baby arrives and it is clear it is an unusual baby, the book begins to explore what it means to be a mother and what it means to be accepted for who you are. Both of these are driven by Tiny’s ever more desperate attempts to protect her child from the interventions of the surrounding world and let her develop into her true self.

There are lots of references to music through the book (and these are collated at the end and also exist, I believe, as a Spotify playlist). These references would probably mean more to someone who knew the pieces referenced and as I knew hardly any of them they didn’t add much to my experience of reading the book.

I found this a slippery and, therefore, intriguing book to read. I like the way it is left for the reader to determine their own interpretation of what is going on. And it is for this reason that I am saying nothing about the plot only about my experience of reading. Readers thinking about trying this book should perhaps be aware that quite a few animals die, or at least appear to die, during the course of the novel (although I am normally quite sensitive to this kind of thing but didn’t find it too upsetting here).

Disturbing, dark and weird. A visceral book on motherhood, with a namesake owl that makes Hedwig an overly sweet teddybear compared to a Grizzlybear
It was easier to love you before you were born

After gestating 9 days I can finally review Chouette after wrapping my head around this disturbing, dark and weird tale. It could basically be distilled into: a successful cellist is smothered by the care for her different child. But a fundamental part of the book is magical realism, that I initially found a bit disorienting, with very little fully normal people appearing. Maybe that’s due to the narrators perspective, since she believes to have grown up with birds. In a literal manner. And there is also a female owl lover that leads to the aforementioned pregnancy.
The visceral isolation of motherhood, including alienation from her husband, is something that is core theme moving further into the book. Sometimes the message is less subtly brought, with for instance this rebuke from her husband: Yes that’s right, you’re the problem. Mothers are always the problem.
In general he has quite cringy quotes, like: When it comes to our little girl can’t is a dirty word or Isn’t that just like you, to piss on a miracle

There are animal infestation, an homicidal, but very small and brittle, hollow boned, owl-baby, and somewhere half way I caught myself thinking: is the main character a dog?
There are epic clap-backs like: There are more subtleties between letting a child run completely free and lobotomy and also sentences that cut to the bone, like: I knew that she loved me, but I was never really sure if what I felt for her in return was love or just a brittle sort of pity.

In the end I was not fully convinced, but Claire Oshetsky takes you on a trip that is hard to forget and absolutely unique.
🦉

Chouette is so beautifully written that you can't help but be enchanted. I admit I felt some confusion as I progressed, wondering exactly what it was I was reading. The author weaves a story that seems fantastically surreal and readers are left to find the truth at the center. Like all the best stories, those conclusions will be richly varied. Though I did lose interest at the halfway point, picking the book up and putting it down again several times, I did enjoy the final act of Chouette spreading her wings. I don't have children so maybe this didn't sing to me the way that it will for others but that said I haven't read anything like it this year.

A brilliant novel which I think will appeal to fans of “Night Bitch” a book I think it resembles with its intense, visceral exploration of motherhood via the medium both of animal-transformation and with a very deliberate “tightrope” walk of the fantastic between whether the book’s central premise is parable, fantast, metaphor or reality.

The book opens with the narrator (Tiny – a concert cellist) recounting a vivid dream of making love with a female owl – finding out two weeks later that she is pregnant. Her all-American patent-lawyer husband (one of a family of six wholesome brothers with wholesome and conventional “dog-baby” children – one of the wives “the secret abortionist” being the only real outsider other than Tiny) is delighted – but Tiny immediately insists that the baby will be an owl-baby – his attitude to that running the range of pity to embarrassment to anger at his wife bringing up past issues and projecting them on to their baby.

But when the baby is born, after a interim trip to Berlin which I have to say did not quite resonate with me, the Doctor’s immediate diagnosis is that the observations at birth (Tufted head, Yellow Eyes, Chitinous scaling) are “consistent with Strigiformes”.

Tiny names her owl-baby Chouette and fiercely resists conventional developmental milestones, standard baby raring and medical intervention – instead letting herself be led by instinct and by Chouette’s developing needs. Her husband – furious at her refusal to give the baby he calls Charlotte a chance at a normal life - takes the opposite view (But here’s the crux of it, owl-baby. Your father wants to fix you, and I want us to love you as you are): seeking help and assistance from schools and doctors. Tiny’s only real ally is her sister-in-law who briefly becomes her lover before being herself unable to accept the reality of Chouette.

From their we have a story of motherhood and I think particularly how as a mother one navigates and breaks free of societal expectations and pre-formed moulds to allow one’s children to grow and develop into their own identities with all the sacrifice of one’s own expectations and pre-conceptions that involves as well as the pain of allowing them to eventually break free of parental influence as well as societal.

This is not a book that will I think appeal to everyone – those looking for a conventional narrative may struggle and for all its celebration of avian life I think some readers will find the deaths of various animals (mainly pets) triggering. None of this applied to me – although I will confess that I was slightly uncomfortable at the scenes set in a church (although these ended more sympathetically then I head feared). I also found that the copious musical references (which are then compiled in an afterword) were almost entirely lost on me.

But nevertheless this is a very striking novel.

"But here’s the crux of it, owl-baby. Your father wants to fix you, and I want us to love you as you are."

Chouette, by Claire Oshetsky is a fiercely empathetic, powerful and beautifully written parable of motherhood, published by Virago in the UK and Ecco in the US and due out in November 2021. It opens:

"I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant.

You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?

I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.

As for you, owl-baby, let’s lay out the facts. Your owlness is with you from the very beginning. It’s there when a first cell becomes two, four, eight. It’s there when you sleep too much, and crawl too late, and when you bite when you aren’t supposed to bite, and shriek when you aren’t supposed to shriek; and on the day that you are born—on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box—I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.

But there you will be, and you will be of me."

Our narrator Tiny senses immediately that her embryonic child is different, as she tells her husband:

“Help me.”
There, it’s done. I’ve said it.
He reaches across the table and grabs my hands.
“What is it?” he says. “What’s on your mind? I love you. I’m here to help.”
“You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” I say. “This baby is an owl-baby.”

Her husband dismisses her fears as early-pregnancy jitters, but as the baby is born she is indeed different to the “dog-babies” her inlaws had come to expect.

Tiny, is a cellist, and music plays a key background role in the novel. The author has provided a Spotify playlist of the pieces features, which I found added to the novel’s already captivating atmosphere, an example being this which inspires the baby’s name.

"And then I hear a soft aria singing in my head, that one from Massenet’s unbearably tragic opera Werther—“Va! laisse couler mes larmes!”—and tears fall inside of me, hammering my heart, until my baby’s true name is revealed. “Her name is Chouette,” I say."

Tiny and her husband take, as the opening quote to my review suggests, different paths to Chouette’s development, with Tiny’s husband anxiously monitoring missed developmental milestones, seeking medical treatment and even calling the baby Charlotte, while Tiny comes to her own realisation that Chouette has special skills of her own:

"Parents underestimate what owl-babies can do, and I realize I’ve been guilty of making the same mistake myself. I’ve been listening too much to your father, who is preoccupied by the way you keep missing typical dog-baby developmental targets, like sits alone without support, when you don’t even bend in the middle, or displays social smile, when your mouth is as hard as a beak, or uses spoon to feed self, when you rip and tear and gorge on food without need of a spoon.

Nowhere in the developmental targets have I ever read: feeds self by killing small domesticated animals.

I’d like to see your dog-cousins try that."

Although as her life becomes increasingly dominated by Chouette, her musical career in literal ruins, anxiously covering over the fact that the aforementioned small domesticated animal was the neighbour’s kids’ escaped gerbil, her husband argues that she is the neglectful one:

"You give up on everything, don’t you?” he says. “Isn’t it just like you, to give up on your music, too? The way you gave up on me? The way you gave up on our girl?”

I could tell him that my cello lies in broken pieces behind the locked door of my home studio, and that wharf rats have stolen away the strings, and that my fingers are like sticks, and my arms are weak with pits and scars. I could tell him that my thoughts are out of tune, and that the idea of music feels like an old forgotten memory in a drawer because my girl takes up every breath and every moment of my life.

But I know he’s asking me a different question altogether. He doesn’t care about my music. He never has. He stopped coming to concerts once we married, as if attending them to begin with was always just part of a courtship ritual that was no longer required of him."

The novel also contains flashbacks to Tiny’s own adolescence and a traumatic event, with echoes of the closing section of The Vegetarian (see below) which led to her first encounter with her owl-lover:

"My mother didn’t answer. She gestured mutely toward her feet. Is it true that her long toes were burying themselves in the ground, so deeply that she could no longer take a step? Do I honestly remember seeing her two feet rooting themselves to the spot? Did her skin really become hard and rough all over, like a tree? Were there really spring-green leaves spilling forth from her fingertips? Or has my adult mind painted the memory of this night in such unlikely colors, as a way to assuage my guilt for leaving her? I could hear men shouting and dogs barking, coming closer. Ahead I could see the tangled thicket. The wind in the trees sounded like the voices of women singing in chorus, and their voices were filled with glottal embellishments, as if sung by throats made of wood. The music urged me forward. And so I left my mother, and went on without her. I wasn’t afraid, because the trees took care of me, and they brooded and bent over me, and sang to me their melancholy songs, and fed me, and gave me succor, until the Bird of the Wood found me and took me home with her and taught me to trust to the sound of my own voice."

The author is one of those (all too few) also highly active on Goodreads as a reviewer and participant in discussion groups, under the username ‘Lark Benobi’, and on her reviewer (as opposed to author) page she lists some of her favourite novels of recent years: The Vegetarian by Han Kang tr. Deborah Smith, Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz tr. Sarah Moses & Carolina Orloff, Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin tr. Megan McDowell, Earthlings by Sayaka Murata tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Sealed by Naomi Booth, Real Life by Adeline Dieudonné re. Roland Glasser and Ladivine by Marie N'Daiye tr. Jordan Stump.

That list has considerable overlap with my own reading, and it is a pleasure to read an anglosphere author in such active dialogue with world literature, although Chouette is a unique work of its own.

I have often cited (including when reviewing Fever Dream) the literary critic Todorov who referred to what he calls the fantastic, arguing that an author can choose between a rational explanation for supernatural events - what Todorov calls "the uncanny" - and a supernatural explanation - what he calls the "marvellous" (and most would call fantasy).

"The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event."

This is a delicate literary tightrope and most novels fail to balance along it for their entire path, but Chouette does so, leaving it for the reader to determine, or indeed to also choose to leave undecided, whether Chouette is a literal owl-baby, or whether the owl-baby condition is a form of developmental or genetic condition.

And Oshetsky uses the “duration of this uncertainty” to explore motherhood in a unique way but also marriage and the impact of parenthood, relationships with extended families particularly in-laws and, above all, how we, both individually as parents and collectively as a society, treat those who are different to our norms.

Highly recommended and surely a strong Woman’s Prize contender.

Chouette by Claire Oshetsky is a very unique take on motherhood and an accomplished piece of writing. Some similar themes to Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder.