This concept seemed too good to be true, but Yoder absolutely delivered! A gruesome, feminist romp that touches on very honest and real feelings that women deal with as they grow older. Am... am I Nightbitch?

OMG!! I haven’t read a book like this ever!! An ode to Kafka, Nightbitch is an ambitious debut that has set the bar high for Yoder’s future books!

The story is unlike anything else, its bafflingly original and truthful in explaining the complexities of motherhood. Although the synopsis reads like it gives a lot away from the plot, it really is just a pea-sized teaser for the wonderment that follows. Writing is just amazing and made me enjoy this weird story more.

Thank you Double Day via Netgalley for the arc.

Fiercely unique, scream-aloud worthy, and passionately original. Just read this damn book in all its brilliance and know little going in.

A searing and outrageous satire of the complexities of motherhood and the yearning for more, Nightbitch is a jaw dropping debut by Rachel Yoder!

A nameless mother has put her creative career on hold to stay at home and raise her son. Her husband travels for work five days a week, leaving the mother to navigate the loneliness and isolation of raising a demanding toddler while constantly grappling with the loss of her former self.

“It’s almost as if having a child does not sate a deep yearning but instead compounds it.” *

One morning the mother notices a patch of hair has suddenly grown on the back of her neck. Soon her canines are razor sharp. Her symptoms are intensifying, her husband is dismissive, and eventually she succumbs to the temptation of canine impulses to let out all her worries and insecurities. Hoping to find happiness and keep her alter-canine secret, the mother now known as Nightbitch embraces a group of mothers from the Babies and Books library program and rescues them from a marketing scheme involving herbs while also rediscovering her creativity through performance art.

I love every over-the-top honest minute with Nightbitch! As someone who was a stay at home mom for the first few years of my child’s life, I found myself commiserating with Nightbitch and understanding the brutal divide between loving your child more than yourself and grieving the loss of self. Tack sharp and clever, I cackled loud and often while reading this novel though I should’ve howled instead!

Huge thanks to Doubleday and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. Nightbitch is scheduled for release on July 20, 2021.

*Quote included is from a digital advanced reader's copy and is subject to change upon final publication.

Nightbitch is absolutely absurd, uncomfortably accurate, and ambitious as hell. The novel spirals around an unnamed woman whose efforts to adjust to stay-at-home motherhood, with its waves of crushing boredom and barely controlled rage, spark her transformation into Nightbitch, a dogwoman prowling the neighborhood in search of freedom and fresh meat. The woman's embrace of animal savagery is inextricably tied up with the societal expectations that led her to abandon her dream job for the joyous, horrific, inescapable company of her two year old; as she struggles to figure out where to direct her anger, her canines sharpen and her hair grows longer. The novel's light mix of the mundane and monstrous will likely feel familiar to anyone who has spent even a little time with young children. Walking through the supermarket, the woman thinks, "Imagine trying to shop for crunchy snacks with a toddler and heightened near-animal sense of smell while the enormity of patriarchal society loomed behind every box of farm-themed crackers, in the crackle of every pretzel box you picked up." Imagine, in other words, entertaining an inner world while another creature, one you created, demands the entirety of your attention, and imagine trying to maintain this sense of self in a world that requires that motherhood be all-encompassing.

Nightbitch will likely not be everyone's cup of tea: it is deeply devoted to a kind of gruesome weirdness that I loved but others will almost certainly find off-putting. It's hard to argue with its power, though. By the end of the novel, the woman's evolution felt not only possible but inevitable—how else to respond to the excruciating, transformative experience of motherhood than by howling at the moon?

Thanks to DoubleDay and NetGalley for the ARC!

I like weird, odd, bizarre literature as much as (more than?) the next guy, but this was a little too out there for me. Don’t think we’d have a readership for this.

A gripping meditation on modern motherhood and femininity told in an entirely new and fascinating way.

NIGHTBITCH! As bizarre as promised and more! This was definitely the kind of book that I found myself thinking about even when I wasn’t reading it. Excellent in both theme and execution, this is definitely a book people are going to be talking about, not just for its quality but also its traffic-stopping premise. Whip-smart on everything from motherhood to artistic agency to emotional labor to essential oil multilevel marketing schemes. The “Good for her” book of 2021.

#Nightbitch
The book is nothing I have ever read before. I found the concept and the idea fascinating. It just felt odd for me at times. It was hard to related to from being a parent of a child with a disability to related to the nightbitch character. Overall, it is a very creative and interesting book.

CW: violence, animal violence
Thank you thank you @doubleday for this ARC - I am OBSESSED!
In the tradition of Kafka, Nightbitch follows our narrator’s lycanthropy from domesticated mother to absolutely feral. The mother loves her son and husband. Yes, she really really does! That is why she gave up her dream job in the arts to full-time mother her bratty son. Her husband makes more money in his 5 days per week travel job, so this choice was natural. And of course she loves her husband, I mean, they got married right? And he is a nice guy. They are happy. She is contained.
Until she is not. Nightbitch has you questioning whether her unadulterated violence is a hallmark of slipping out of her skin or growing into it? Is she losing control or finally gaining it back? Either way, Nightbitch is the embodiment of pure feminine rage - that mythic, red hot pulsing rage that started at the first rape and never stopped. The rage that resides in every femme paying the penance of womanhood.
Because in truth, when are femmes just allowed to be? To dream. To achieve? Whether we are working moms, forever single, full-time moms, never moms, or too young to be moms, we hold a coin that has a losing side. We sacrifice relentlessly, and modern feminism only makes martyrs out of our molehills. Our rage is our release, because we want what we want, and everytime we are told there are good women and there are wanting women. To me, Nightbitch, as graphic and violent and unpalatable as it is, was satisfying because it ached of accuracy.
Interestingly, I watched Promising Young Woman the same day that I finished Nightbitch, and found the two pieces in conversation with one another. I cannot stop thinking about either, tbh. Have you read this book or seen the movie? How do you feel about feral revenge and animalistic violence as metaphors (or not) for the rage we feel? As for myself, I am honestly here for it. When I think of the men who get away with rape, women who are bullied into silence, and disenfranchised from their lives, I feel Nightbitch-type rage. When I think of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, I feel red hot rage. Perhaps this rage is a defense mechanism for sorrow, but I feel it from the pit of my heart.

Where to even begin. I'm a noted enjoyer of "weird" fiction, so I was thrilled to receive a copy of this book.

I was instantly gripped by the story of the unnamed narrator and her family, as we are trapped in her head along with her and experience the frustration and loneliness of her daily life, as she essentially single parents a toddler while her husband is gone all week for work. The mother has a masters in art and had to leave her dream job to care for her child, and constantly feels undervalued and alienated by her STEM minded husband and his dismissal of her worries of transforming into a beast. Consumed by the drudgery of her daily existence and the uncertainty of her transformation, she turns to the library for answers, and finds a mysterious book. This is where the novel really goes on a wild ride.

I tried to go back and see if I had written any notes to really explain how the book had captured me that this point, only to find that all I had written was repetition of the meme, "Are you tired of being nice? Don't you just want to go ape shitt," which I'll admit sounds deeply stupid but really does encapsulate the visceral glee I experienced along with the mother in her transformation.

Though it is often wrapped in the vaguely absurd context of a mother transforming into a massive dog, there was honest and thoughtful reflection on modern motherhood and womanhood, ambition and rage.

The scene in which the mother is having lunch with her art school friends is absolutely my favorite moment of the entire novel, and one of my favorite things I've read in recent memory.

I don't want to say that the third part of the novel wasn't as good as the other two or that it was a letdown, but it is an abrupt change from the intensely claustrophobic stream of consciousness of the first two parts of the book. It does absolutely make sense within the narrative, especially with what happens at the end of the second act. I wasn't completely satisfied with how a few of the plot points were resolved (husband, the author), but the final scene is deeply cathartic and an excellent conclusion to a mystifying and gripping book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

“This book was weird, even by my standards” that quote from a reviewer caught my eye, and I knew I needed to read this strange tale of a new mother who thinks she is turning into a dog. With descriptions of fur on her neck, extra nipples on her belly and running the streets at night naked, I asked myself many times, is she an actual dog out at night, or is it theoretical?
I think many a new mom can relate to the loneliness of motherhood when you are home,your husband is working on the road, and you feel you have no purpose beyond caring for your child. A former art career in the dust and leaving her aching for more, she finds solace in a strange field guide of wild women around the world she found at the library.
It was starting to feel a bit overplayed when things took a major shift at a very shocking turn of events. You’ll know it when you get there.
The oddness continues, but wraps into quite a beautiful ending that I felt at peace with. Not sure if I can say with utter confidence that this one will be a winner, or if I would recommend it to any of my reader friends. But one thing is for sure, fellow readers will definitely follow up with some very interesting conversations.

Thank you Netgalley and Doubleday Books for this advance readers copy!

This was the book I didn't know I needed. This tale takes us through the evolution of a new(ish) mother as she encounters, acknowledges, and accepts the transformation that happens when women become mothers. It's violent and tender, resentful and loving, hostile and miraculous. The vehicle Yoder uses is a delightful amalgamation of fairy tale, magic, and dream. It's also a brave novel, in that our protagonist admits things that new mothers often feel and think--but are conditioned to repress. And yet, our author manages to do this while still portraying the abs0lute love and wonder a woman can have for her child.

It's really a remarkable book. You'll get lost in the dream (sometimes the nightmare) of Nightbitch, but you also might discover it's a very familiar place to you.

I'm not even sure what to say here. This book is super weird and poignant and bloody and fantastic. I loved it, I want to buy a copy, I want to make all my friends read it. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Once calling herself Nightbitch as a joke, the unnamed mother in this novel officially dubs herself the title when she realizes she's transforming into a dog. Her husband is gone half the week on business trips, deserting her with their unruly two year old son. Nightbitch's inner turmoil-- fueled primarily by her husband's neglect and giving up her career for her family-- has been building, and relief only comes on the nights she can transform completely into her canine form, running naked under the stars and hunting creatures in the forest. Cathartic at times, Nightbitch is a bizarre, surreal, and ultimately feral novel that lights a fuse, igniting the rage and power that simmers under the skins of those who feel trapped-- much like an unconquerable animal finally breaking free from its confines.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder is a brilliant book. I've never seen the concepts from "Women who run with the Wolves" incorporated into a novel before (or perhaps I have but never this cleverly.) Yoder hits all the resonant points about motherhood--the feelings of neglect, being misunderstood by partners, the tedium, the grime.....all of it. The mother here is one we know--she is us, really; all modern mothers. She is complex, neglected by her spouse and herself, isolated. She is so well-drawn. She is so familiar.

I've read many novels about contemporary motherhood, but none as smart as this one. This satirical novel will make you cringe and howl. I loved it.

Completely surreal yet emotionally sincere, Nightbitch dives deep into the multifaceted under-appreciation and societal suppression of motherhood and womanhood, through a bespoke blend of punchy character study and shapeshifting folklore. Rachel Yoder articulates her narrative with a sharp balance of genre absurdism and honest commentary, without ever letting it be bogged down by needless gore or overt camp. Yes, while some of its plot threads were a little too easily explained away towards the end, Nightbitch remains an emotionally ferocious, fever dream-like reading journey that is completely worth experiencing.

Believe the hype! This novel is such a riot. I don't even know where to begin -- Yoder has rendered a story about motherhood and art through the plot of a suburban full-time mom afraid she's turning into a dog. It simply happens one day, and she slowly begins to unravel, and in this unraveling Yoder lets us into some gorgeous moments between the mother and her son. While the novel is often comical, there is more heart here than most lit-fic novels. This is a true achievement, and I look forward to seeing what Yoder does next.

In Nightbitch, Yoder perfectly and hilariously captures all of the anxiety, the monotony, the guilt, and the rage that encompasses new motherhood. A witty metaphor of modern motherhood, societal myths, gender norms, and biology that is both hysterical and painfully, embarrassingly relatable. A true literary achievement.

This is the Kafka-esque nightmare I've been looking for.

Nightbitch leaves her dream job in the arts, to take care of her son full time. At the beginning of the story, the boy is two and she's turning into a dog. Her husband dismisses her concerns and thinks she has it easy because she gets to be home all day while he travels every week for work. Things go to 100 from there. We're inside Nightbitch's head through the whole story and we feel every damn thing. It was almost claustrophobic. Even thinking about it now is making my heart rate go up.

Yes, it's about motherhood but it's also about all female stress, suffering and rage. The boredom and fatigue of staying home. Being undervalued and overlooked even after giving yourself, your ambitions, up. I'm not a mother, but I've had so many of these same thoughts run through me. I've been in conversations where I'm not included or ignored, not considered worthy.

Do all women have these thoughts, but we just don't tell each other (we're told to instead lean in)? Have we created some competition to grin and bear it and she who breaks first loses? But here Nightbitch wins. She realizes that "the work is the life. There isn't a distinction," This book is both fantastical and truthful; hilarious and devastating.