Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a DRC of this title for review. All opinions are my own.

This was a wild ride. On one hand, the sheer implausibility of it (a girl with a twin no one knows about who somehow has managed to survive in the wilderness, on her own, for 10 years?) makes it a hard sell. But then, as you start to read it, you get sucked in to the story and it becomes something you can't really look away from. There are themes of feminism, striking out on your own, religion vs morality, etc that make it compelling at times, but they also complicate things. This is a book that struggles under the own weight of itself. Instead of just being a horror/noir book about a girl who has become feral, it tries to become a commentary on society in general. And there aren't really any redeeming characters.

Final verdict: this is a second purchase type of book for large collections. It will have niche readers and that type of following, but it will not be a beloved book by all.

Thanks, Netgalley, for letting me read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Jolene lives with her aunt in a small town in Ohio. Her twin sister, Lee, lives in the woods just outside of town, but no one believes she exists. Their mother disappeared 15 years ago and everyone thinks she was murdered. Lee is almost feral and Jolene has an intense need to protect her sister at all costs. When Lee's existence is substantiated, Jolene, Lee, and Jolene's BFF Savannah, run away to the wilderness.

The book started off with a lot of potential, but the characters never got well fleshed out. It was hard to connect with them and actually care what was happening. The last bit of the book jumped the shark and made me feel as though the girls really had no morality. It seemed like a "neat" way to tie the book into a bow and there were no consequences for the horrid decisions the girls made.

While I didn't love this book, I did not hate it, either. I would not recommend this book, but would be open to reading something else from the a

I'm sorry to the author but I just cant do it with this book anymore. I really tried I really did but I DNF'd it at 30% mark. The cover was what made me really want to give this book a try and the premise sounded really interesting but this book is all over the place. It has so much teen angst that its literally filled to them brim with it. The characters are not most likeable in the world. To be honest I could really stand them and it was hard to connect with any of them. Jo was old enough to know that something was wrong with her sister and I could see how she didnt really catch on when she was younger to how severe the situation was with Lee. She should have made it a priority to help her now that she was older. There was a lot stuff that just repetitive in this story. The writing was weird every chapter would start as a flashback most of the time and then go back to the present or vise versa. It seemed like there was so much going on that it got confusing. I was excited about this one because it seemed like it was gonna be really different but It just fell flat for me.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me copy to read and review.

This book was rather... meh. I tend to enjoy thrillers, and this one just fell rather flat. I don't think the comparisons to Sadie are deserved. I just can't see my students reading this book with any interest.

I didn't end up being able to get into this one, so I DNFed it. There was too much exposition at the beginning and i was confused at the same time as to what was going on. It's an interesting concept but the writing didn't click with me. THank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'm pretty bummed about this one. There just wasn't anything particularly exciting about the story and I found it to be a bit confusing.

From the first chapter, I knew this wasn't my kind of thriller. I just couldn't really connect with the girls and for that reason I am choosing to pass up this book. I appreciate the opportunity, but it's just not my cup of tea.

This book was... Weird. The initial premise was interesting, but the further along the book got, the more crazy things were. There was some weird stuff going down in that town. Overall I liked Jo as a character but the story was way too out there for me.

There was too much going on in this book. The author (with the help of the editor) needed to pick a direction and stick with it. Since it seemed like the author wanted to do it all the book was too long, too directionless, and the heroine was not strong enough to carry all the threads of the story the author expected her to.

This was a different read and interesting but didnt keep my interest as much as I thought it was going to. It was a bit repetitive and was a bit hard to connect with the characters in the story. Wasnt quite sure where this story was going. Thanks though for letting me have the option to read this early.

Some Kind of Animal sounded like such a great book to me but it just didn’t really hit the nail on the head. I found the characters hard to connect with and the writing was a bit awkward and highly repetitive, which made me quickly loose interest in both the characters and the story itself. Interesting concept but just wasn’t executed properly. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for sending me an ARC of this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for my digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book because the premise sounded really interesting and I wanted to see where it went. Honestly, I can see that I liked this book more than most people seemed to and I really don't know why. The book follows fifteen-year-old, Jolene, who has not had the best life so far. As her mother went missing when she was born and is presumed dead, her grandmother and aunt took her into their homes, respectively. One night when she is 5 years old, Jolene sees a girl out near the woods and it was like looking in a mirror. She realizes the little girl is her twin sister, that nobody even knew she had. How is that even possible? Well, when Jolene was a baby, she was brought to her grandmother's house all wrapped up in a bundle by the brother of her mother's boyfriend at the time. Nobody ever mentioned another little girl so nobody had any idea she was alive and out there all alone. For ten years, Jo has been living a normal life by day and running wild with her sister at night. Until it starts to get to be too much and she falls asleep in school and falls behind on homework...she tells Lee(the sister) that she won't be able to run at night anymore for awhile and she thinks everything is okay. Until one night she is out with a boy and Lee attacks him, nearly killing him. Suddenly everyone in town thinks it was JO that attacked him and they want blood. During all of this, we start to find out what happened to their mother and nothing is what she thought it was...I'm going to stop there but the book had so many twists and turns that once you reach a certain point, you just don't want to stop. Or at least I didn't. I liked it a lot and I would personally recommend it to anyone that would be interested in the psychological aspect of what is happening.

I'm not really sure what to think of this book. I requested this based on cover alone and expected a YA thriller.

It fell short on my expectations. I appreciate the chance to read this in advance but I unfortunately couldn't finish this book.

Sadly I just could not connect with this book. The only person I actually liked was Brandon. The story itself was interesting though, two sisters, separated, trying to work out their relationship when it’s suddenly exposed. The writing was fine and the pacing was okay. My main issues was that I just couldn’t find myself liking the characters as much. The relationship between the sisters was okay and the secret behind their family was okay. Maybe this would be better for someone else but it just did not work out for my preferences as well as I had hoped.

Unfortunately, I was not a fan of this book, and judging by the other reviews, I'm not alone, which makes me feel bad for the author. But this book was just all over the place! It seems to try to encompass every genre possible, and it seems like it's following a straight path and then just kind of meanders. And so much was unrealistic and the characters weren't anyone you'd really like.

Thank you NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I had a really hard time connecting with the characters in this book, I honestly disliked more of them than I liked, Which is mostly due to some of the characters being pretty bad people. The idea of the story is great, a young girl, Jo, who has a secret little sister Lee, that lives out in the woods and no one knows she exists except for Jolene. An event occurs where Lee attacks 2 people and now Jolene needs to make a decision, does she side with her sister and run away or side with other people in her town and stay away from her sister. The characters would make the oddest choices and that really effected how to story was portrayed, I wanted to stop reading so many times because I was getting so frustrated. The ending made me feel a little bit better though, not as much as I had hoped .

I thought there were some interesting things going on in this book, but unfortunately, they never seemed to come together in a meaningful way for me.

A weird and creepy story, no less enjoyable for its eccentricities.

** Content warning for child abuse, domestic violence, addiction, mental illness, and misogyny. **

"I hide myself as much as I hide my sister. I hide the person I am when I’m with her. When I was a kid it was easier. How I acted in the day wasn’t much different from how I acted at night. Outside of school at least, the kids of Lester roved about, playing in the woods behind someone’s house or alongside the train tracks, fighting with sticks, running races, trying to catch fish in Monday Creek, acting out plays with dead bugs as the actors. But as I got older, there were more and more things that weren’t acceptable or cool, especially for a girl.

***

"I added them all to the secret half of me."
"That’s the one thing we do all have in common. Pretty much every kid I know is looking forward to the day when they can escape this place. Savannah dreams about moving to a city. She’s always going on about her second cousin in Cincinnati. Other kids talk about heading up to Columbus or down to Delphi.
"Me, though, I already escape every single night."

***
"We are lambs who refuse to learn, I think. We will wander until the end of our days, not afraid of wolves. But together. Always together."

***

Fifteen-year-old Jolene “Jo” Richards has a sister – an identical twin only she knows about. Lee is a wild thing, a feral child, who lives in the national forest that surrounds their hometown of Lester, Ohio. At night, Jo sneaks out her bedroom window to run with Lee. By day, she pretends to be an ordinary, unexceptional girl.

Well, as “normal” as a kid like her can be; it’s hard to stay under the radar when your mom is missing and presumed dead, a likely teenage murder victim. Jolene, for whom Jo was named, had Jo at fifteen. When Jo’s grandmother Margaret found out about the pregnancy, she kicked her daughter out of the house. For a while, Jolene lived in a double-wide trailer on the outskirts of town with “the Cantrell boys” (said in ominous tones, natch), Logan and Brandon. Logan, the older of the two, was widely considered bad news: he sold drugs, abused women, and is possibly Jo’s father. (It’s hard to know for sure; Jolene was “friendly,” as they like to say.)

The last time anyone saw Jolene alive, she was enormously pregnant and pounding onion rings at the bowling alley – in the company of none other than Logan and Brandon. A week later, Brandon showed up on Margaret’s doorstep and thrust a newborn baby into her arms. Now Jo lives with her Aunt Aggie … and haunts the night with a specter that only she can see.

When a teenage boy is attacked in the woods, Jo the only witness (it happened during her first kiss, the horror), the crime sets off a cataclysmic chain of events. For nearly a decade, Jo has tried to keep Lee hidden, a secret. Lee is wild and paranoid and free; discovery equals captivity, imprisonment, domestication. Maybe even scientific study. Certainly death – if not of Lee’s body, then her spirit.

But is Jo willing to trade her own freedom for Lee’s? After all, the girl who attacked that boy wears Jo’s face. Everyone thinks it was Jo who ripped out a boy’s throat during a midnight makeout session. As if her rep wasn’t already sketchy enough.

SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is, well, kind of bonkers, and I mean that in the best way possible. I try not to shy away from 3-star books, because every once in awhile I’m delightfully surprised by a story that everyone else seems to hate – or hold ambivalent feelings for, at best. (See, e.g., THE BLONDES by Emily Schultz.) SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is 110% one of those books: it’s bizarre and meandering and the plot never seems to lead where you think it will.

It defies easy categorization. Is it a mystery? A supernatural thriller? A horror story? A psychological study? A cultural critique? All of the above?

SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is its own beast, and it’s what I love most about it.

If I had to sum it up as a mashup, I’d pitch SOME KIND OF ANIMAL as THELMA & LOUISE meets OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS (or insert your own YA survivalist story here), maybe with a touch of THE GRACE YEAR. It’s so many things, but at its core beats a fierce feminist heart. This is a story about sisterhood, in both the literal and larger sense. About the way society judges women – and conditions women to judge one another.

Through Jolene and Jo and Lee and Savannah, Moore interrogates slut shaming and woman hating. Collectively, they are living, breathing illustrations of how society prefers its women dead and tragic – and maybe just a little bit sexy – rather than alive and wild and in control of their own sexuality. Each is a fascinating character in her own right, but it is their relationships with one another that truly sparkle and ignite.

SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is also a compulsive thriller; more than a hundred pages go by before Moore lets use know whether Lee is simply a figment of Jo’s imagination (no spoilers here!). There’s a supernatural, otherwordly vibe to the story that I adore; these pages are populated by the night creatures, and I half expected a witch or vampire to emerge at some point. The pacing is pretty wild, too; it feels like you’re reaching the climax of the story about halfway through – but, alas, there are still 190 pages left! Where will Moore lead us next? (Astray, hopefully, because these liminal spaces are where the magic happens.)

Anyway, I’m glad I snagged an ARC before the reviews started rolling in; I might have passed on it otherwise. It’s the kind of story you either love or hate, and I fall firmly into the former camp.

Riveting from the start, this story hooks you and refuses to let go.

Jo’s life is a mess of tightly-furled secrets. When they begin to unravel in damning ways, Jo races into the woods to find her feral sister, Lee. In the heart of the forest, Lee reveals the truth of where their supposedly-murdered mother went, how Lee survived, and why their tiny town isn’t safe for Jo to go back to. Lee insists they have to run, and the story becomes a fast-paced, ever-darkening journey.

While I wanted Lee and Jo to find some safe way to integrate back into the civilized world together, I knew it would never accept them. They are two halves of their mother’s heart, just as wild, just as feral. The ending gave me hope Jo and Lee could grow the way they were always supposed to: together.

I don't know if I've ever been so frustrated by a book I flew threw so fast. SOME KIND OF ANIMAL got me out of a reading slump. Romasco-Moore is such a talented writer. I fell into the prose and voice, and the premise hooked me from page one—how can I resist a feral sister? It was such a weird book, and I love, love weird. After the first quarter of the book, I was sure this was going to be a hit for me. Maybe even an all-time fave.

What ultimately left me feeling let down, though, is how the MC, Jo, never faces consequences for the terrible things she does and says. In fact, the narrative seems to twist itself around to forgive her—forgive her for being an awful friend to Savannah, forgive her for getting two innocent people KILLED. The ultimate takeaway is that "people suck" and, I don't know, that's just too nihilistic for me.