RaveRumpusIt’s the chorus of Everton’s dead that narrate the novel, and their affection for the town and its residents is what softens the stark, brutal reality of the fractured community. Although the novel moves at a brisk pace, its characters carefully and lovingly drawn, its developments surprising and credible, it has the feel at times of a gossip session ... The first-person plural as a narrative device affords moments of lyrical wandering that telescope perspective and time, so that tangents and quirks, the past and the present, all fold into the central action of the story ... What’s special about Hartnett’s chorus of the dead, though, is that they stress the tension between overlapping realities ... At the center of this big-hearted face-licker of a novel is a careful study of how we evolve through the act of caretaking ... This is a big novel doing big things. It bears some similarity to Hartnett’s much loved first novel, Rabbit Cake, which centered on another family in crisis, and also featured lots of animals. It was tragicomic and told in a simple voice that belied its emotional complexity and brio. But Unlikely Animals is a broader, brassier, and even more fiercely tender story. In this, her second novel, Hartnett lands an astonishing leap as a storyteller. She explores how we construct the miraculous after our promise has left us, and challenges us to dream through disillusionment even as suffering derails us.
Paul Griner
RaveThe Rumpus... vital, arresting ... Griner is too skilled a realist to allow The Book of Otto and Liam to become a simple revenge story. There are indeed moments of exhilarating rectification, but these moments are so deeply grounded in the novel’s moral texture that each victory is balanced by an awareness of what’s forfeited ... The Book of Otto and Liam is a serious and urgent book, with the power to appall, outrage, thrill and make a reader mourn; it is also a very funny book ... Trauma narratives all too often collapse into a kind of torture porn, entertainments akin to the disaster tourism that repulsed the officer at the novel’s opening. But Griner gives us a story that is at once bursting with life and hollowed out by death, that celebrates our humanity and knows all our dirty secrets. The Book of Otto and Liam is a portrait of us in our present moment, battered by a reckless and deceitful government, battling our own inurement to daily horrors, and doing our best to get on with the business of living.
