The thing I was prepared to like least about Amelia Morris’s funny and engrossing debut novel — new motherhood and all the requisite growing pains — ultimately became the thing I admired about it most ... I have been known to ask friends what, if anything, they like about having kids. Leanne Hazelton, the narrator of Wildcat, answered that question for me in tender, often quotidian ways ... The more powerful parts of the story come from Morris’s witty observations ... There are also poignant epiphanies about family, which occur via a truce with her Republican physician mother and a severing of ties with her father’s embittered widow. I reread that chapter several times, feeling as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me, and suspecting I wasn’t reading fiction at all ... Wildcat was a book I couldn’t set down for long.
In this sly and funny commentary on the institution of motherhood, Morris...delivers a compulsively readable product. With short chapters and buttery-smooth prose, it’s also an exploration of the ebbs and flows of female friendship and how people can betray each other in microscopic ways.
Sparkling ... Perfectly captures the false intimacy of social media and how confusing its connections can be, an ambience intensified by Morris’s arresting, concise observations ... These zany episodes yield great drama.
Snappy ... Morris has her finger on the pulse of many things: the sweetness of early motherhood, the grief of losing a parent, the ups and downs of launching a life in writing, the role of economic and career status in female friendships. Like Dana Spiotta's Wayward but funnier, the novel is also a hard look at the role of social media in women's lives ... Morris is also unusually gentle with her heroine, giving her a supercool bestselling author for a mentor and punishing her less severely for her mistakes than in the traditional fiction model ... A smart, juicy, of-the-moment read.
