Oh dear. Bizarre is not necessarily equivalent to interesting. Here is the novel's premise: a young woman, Mary Green, breaks up with her boyfriend of five years. The relationship has seen considerable strain; numerous heated arguments have been fought over Mary’s failure to commit and her ambivalence about having children. She buys out her partner’s share of the house they had purchased together. Mary then develops a relationship, bordering on romantic, with a fox that enters the backyard. Soon, she is attempting to control, "civilize" and protect the animal in the very way she resented her boyfriend doing with her. I cringed when the protagonist began to address the creature as "darling" and felt sorry for the animal’s being trapped in Cocozza's novel. No fox deserved that fate.

This too precious and often silly novel lumbers towards the literary. It is very tedious. It is possible that HOW TO BE HUMAN would have made a more successful short story than a novel, but maybe only because it would have ended sooner. The book lurches along, straining under an ever-growing weight of sensory details. I cannot tell you how fed up I got reading about the puffs of musk that were emitted (seemingly endlessly) from the fox's rear.

In the end, I could only wonder why this increasingly deranged woman hadn’t simply got a dog.

A mysterious and metaphorical exploration of one woman's spiralling breakdown after the end of a relationship as she faces the expectations of the future. I found it difficult to get involved in Mary's story, but the treatment of her life is intriguing.

As much as I enjoy strange novels, especially those that take familiar topics and give them an unusual angle, "How to Be Human" was a bit more than I bargained for in that regard, testing my personal definitions of what uncomfortable and creepy literature is. The novel does a wonderful job at presenting Mary as a convincing character that transcends the typical woman in crisis, even though her backstory - disliking her job, breaking off her engagement, not wanting to have children - is familiar enough to most readers. Even the premise of her finding comfort and a kind of support through a fox is interesting. Where things fall through is in the execution and the way in which this relationship is manifested. The breaking point for me was probably the moment when Mary attends the BBQ and has told people she is seeing someone, answering that he couldn't make it when asked why she came alone. That "someone" is the fox, and it is this development of a kind of romantic tie to the fox that began to test my comfort level. Similarly, readers who might have the same reaction will probably then have their patience further tested by the lengthy descriptions and musings Mary makes of the fox, which is also characteristic of the novel in general. In this regard, I also found "How to be Human" rather dull in places, as it captured what, based on my earlier impressions, is a rather bland English society, regardless of wealth or position. There was just something overall bland about it that raised the question of why I should continue to reading the novel despite all these things. I ended up largely skimming after the halfway mark as a result. "How to Be Human" will find its target audience and interested reader, but I didn't end up being either of those. It was a bit much to handle, and while some passages were captivating, the novel is largely of a wonderful premise being pulled in different directions in the final embodiment they take on.