Thank you to NetGalley, Harper Collins, and Claire Oshetsky for the ARC of Chouette in return for an honest review.

Thought-provoking in an eerie, strange way. This book is well-written, but a challenge to read. Tiny, a pregnant mom, and her husband, are looking forward to the birth of their first child. The child is born small, with her own set of issues, causing her parents to disagree on how to raise her. The father researches and looks for answers to help the child become “normal”. Her mother disagrees, questioning what is really “normal” and should the child be allowed to just be herself. This is an age-old child rearing issue, so the reader will have to decide for themselves how Chouette should be raised.

Chouette is a truly bizarre and heartbreaking story of a mother's love, a father's hope, and how parents can want different things while still wanting the best for their child. I found the book both engrossing and confusing. Ultimately I tried to take the words on the page for what they were as I was reading and then spent time after finishing the book to explore the themes and possible interpretations. I think this will be a wonderful bookclub book for those who like deep conversations about motherhood and love.

4/5 Stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Ecco for providing me with an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a strange and marvelous book about parenting an unusual child, literally an "owl-baby, " though only the baby's mother, Tiny, seems to realize the truth of Chouette's life. Although the rest of the characters frequently fail to listen to Tiny and treat her almost as dismissively as they treat Chouette, she is a believable narrator feeling her way forward. Although this book feels like it belongs to the genre of maternal horror, that is not how Tiny experiences her life (although readers may feel that a number of elements of Tiny's life, including her husband and in-laws, are horrifying). It is not a book for the easily distressed or disgusted (owls are not tidy eaters, and they like to eat live things; Tiny's life changes drastically when she becomes pregnant, and anyone who has played an instrument will wince at the fate of her cello). As Tiny writes to Chouette, "The birds are telling me that my life's work, as your mother, will be to teach you how to be yourself--and to honor however much of the wild world you have in you, owl-baby--rather than mold you to be what I want you to be, or what your father wants you to be." That is not a simple task no matter how many parents would voice similar sentiments, and the novel challenges us to reassess our own expectations of family, ability, and the relationships between parents and children. The immersive story telling and Tiny's own distinctive voice makes it an easy challenge to accept.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for the chance to read this novel.

This book was a wild ride. Unexpected twists. Joy, sadness…a whole gamut of emotions. Strange and unusual. I couldn’t put it down. Loved it.

This is a special book. It is deeply bizarre but resonates as true, even as it avoids being a simple allegory or fable. Beautifully written and imagined. I'm not going to forget Tiny or her journey with Chouette; I feel a kinship to them for having read about their bond.

This book is not for everyone. I am not sure if I am smart enough to know what exactly what this book is, what it means or what it is trying to say. It is an allegory I suppose and there are many themes throughout. Instead of trying to guess I am just going to give my take on it.

Yes Chouette is about motherhood, mental health, family and marriage. I took the fact that Charlotte/Chouette is an owl baby to mean she is differently abled as the rest of her family are dog people. One thing I will say, this book was so absorbing, I couldn't put it down. It made me feel so many things, the writing was beautiful and I cared about Tiny and Chouette so much. I felt Tiny's pain, love and confusion about her beloved baby. I felt her hurt when her husband ignores her. Claire Oshetsky writes a brilliant take on motherhood that pushed boundaries and shows what it means to be a mother and the sacrifices we make for our children. I loved it.

I think this is more a case of "this book just was not for me" than anything else. I enjoy fabulism in shorter form, but it's hard for me to stretch interest into novel length, especially when none of the characters in this book is relatable or even remotely normal. Despite a few lines that made me wince, Oshetsky is a beautiful writer, I greatly appreciated her use of metaphor, and I think the idea of this book will be especially appealing to parents whose kids are beautifully "different" from what's considered the norm. But it unfortunately was a little too out there for me, and not engaging enough to sustain my interest.

Claire Oshetsky's Chouette is a disarmingly surreal tale speaking very real truths about motherhood. Tiny, whose unconventional upbringing we come to know as the book progresses, knows she's about to give birth to an owl-baby. She tries to warn her husband, but he refuses to consider the possibility that this baby will be anything other than perfectly normal.

The baby is born and is, yes, an owl-baby, a composite creature who seems much more owl than human. Tiny is determined to love the baby as she is, though loving an owl-baby in real life is a much more complex business than loving an owl-baby in utero. Tiny tries to see and support the owl-baby's true self, which includes things like buying "pinky mice" to feed her, taking the owl-baby on nighttime hunting runs, and keeping her lips sealed when the owl-baby consumes a neighborhood pet. Tiny's husband is convinced that the owl-baby can be fixed. With the right school or the right diet or the right companion or the right surgery, she *will* become the baby of his imagining. As you might expect, such differing opinions on how to raise an owl-baby are impossible to reconcile, and tensions grow steadily between the couple.

This is Tiny's story, and Oshetsky clearly wants readers to empathize with her and the increasingly drastic steps she must take to meet the owl-baby's needs. The message here—and I'm about to reveal some assumptions that others may find off-putting—is that parenthood requires accepting the child you give birth to and that mothers are much more adept at embracing the unexpected from their children than are men, who see the world as a place they can fix to suit their needs. This viewpoint is based in experience. When I came out to my parents some forty years ago, neither was comfortable with that truth. (It was 1980; I'm not holding that response against either of them at this point.) Nonetheless, their responses were telling. My father repeatedly lectured me about how close the American Psychiatric Association vote removing homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses was. My mother said "it's the child's job to do what is right for themselves in this world; it's the parents' job to come to terms with that." Neither one up and joined PFLAG, and both have come a long, long way since—but that difference between efforts to argue me out of my identity and an acknowledgement that others' difficulties with my identity were not my problem struck me powerfully.

Chouette gives readers a chance to dig to the heart of parenting in a way so foreign that, oddly enough, it becomes ordinary. My one caveat is that a lot of small animals get eaten over the course of this novel. If that's the sort of material you have trouble reading, you may want to look for a different opportunity to understand families via the process of seeing the real in the surreal.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher; the opinions are my own.

Chouette
By Claire Oshetsky

This is a very bizarre book. The writing is reasonably good, but the story itself is so strange that, by about half way through, I just couldn't go on reading.

This is about a woman who bears an "owl child" instead of the "dog child" which it appears other people are. The child is, in fact, more owl than child.

I am not sure exactly what the point of the whole thing is, but, while it may be to somebody's taste, it definitely wasn't to mine.

This is quite a tale from the wonderful Claire Oshetsky. Chouette explores motherhood, ableism, enforced conformity, and other themes in a remarkably fresh way. There is plenty of dark humor, which makes Chouette a delightful read despite the issues it grapples with. Dog-people may not get it, but for the rest of us this is revelatory.

Absolutely tremendous take on the animalistic intensity of motherhood versus the community. An over-nurturing mother cannot understand the world's views on her baby's deformity, which she enables to animalistic heights. Each page kept me guessing. "Is this person insane, is she correct, is everyone else insane?" Out of the recent "motherhood as an animal" genre, this is my favorite.

A baby is on the way. Dad is ecstatic; Mom is hesitant for she knows the baby is the child of her lover, an owl. Throughout the child Chouette’s story her father fights the obvious and tries many methods to “cure” his daughter while the mother is her champion and does anything to help her survive. Their marriage is shaky; will this unusual turn of events set them farther apart, perhaps toward destruction? Magical realism can enrich a novel for me, but unfortunately in the case of Claire Oshetsky’s work, I am at a loss. Its message confuses me and at times I find the descriptive passages repulsive and the characters unappealing.

To say this is a “different” read is an understatement.
Some may love this, some may hate it.
When I started this I was thinking WTF?, an owl baby??!!!
Ultimately, this is a parable.. about a mother’s love for her child.
This owl baby was born and the mother went to any length to care for her.. no matter what obstacles came about and no matter what her husband, in-laws, or the general population thought was best for the child.
It’s different alright… sometimes horrific, sometimes funny, sometimes unbelievable, but I enjoyed it!

(Since the mother was a cellist, there are many classical music references mentioned in the story that I just must look up and listen to.)

Oh….and this cover is gorgeous!

Thank you to Netgalley and Ecco for the ARC!

I really enjoyed Chouette- it has beautifully horrifying imagery, and feels like a bit of a surreal/absurd take on motherhood. I think everyone who reads Chouette will get different things out of it, but for me, I was captivated by the loss of self that happens to Tiny as she becomes a mother. The ending of the book felt like an inevitability(the murders and Chouette blossoming), just as a child leaving their parents and becoming their own person is inevitable. I can see this book not being for everyone- you can't draw concrete and certain parallels between any moment and any particular metaphor, and Tiny is an unreliable narrator. However, I loved this book and devoured it in 2 sittings, just as Chouette devoured pinkie mice.

Honestly I had to stop reading this book. It wasn’t for me and I just really didn’t know what to do with myself. Owl baby was too much and I felt like I was watching that Pixar short movie Bao. I just couldn’t I’m sorry.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

"An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis."

Such a weirdly, uncomfortable compelling read. But, I remember being a first-time mother and that was also weird and uncomfortable and incredible.

3☆

It's...fantasy? It's...a metaphor? It's...a fever-dream? I don't know exactly how to classify this thought-provoking novel about a woman who gives birth to an owl. Is she an unreliable narrator extraordinaire, or is she the only one in the story who can actually see clearly? This delves into disability, the ideals and pressures of motherhood, sexuality, the meaning of marriage and family, what it means to know someone intimately, medical intervention, and--depending on how you read it--mental illness. Chouette is full of complex layers and images and actions and words--a dazzling feast for the reader.

DNF at 17%. Owl baby! WTF? This book was just too weird for me to get into. Weird for the sake of being weird. just doesn't cut it for me. I've got better things to do with my time.

This one started off strong as an innovative take on a fable/fairy tale about motherhood. Once the baby is born, however, the story veers much too close to reality for the fable aspect to actually work, and it ultimately became the confused story of a probably mentally ill mother of a severely disabled child with very weird metaphors sprinkled throughout realistic situations. The book needed to choose fairy tale or reality, and it didn’t. Digital ARC from Netgalley; the book will be published November 16, 2021.

5 "provocative, startling, liberating" stars !!

My thanks to Netgalley, the author and Ecco publishing for an e-copy. This will be released November 2021. I am providing my honest review.

This is a novel that bombards the senses. This is a novel that defies genres. This is a novel that challenges your notions of what a good life is or even a good-enough life. This is a novel that challenges your ideas of what suburban oppression does to women, the queer, the psychiatric, the physically disabled.

Tiny is small in stature and she gives birth to an owl baby. She conceived this baby with a woman, a bird woman. Tiny has always been different. Tiny has lots of rage that plays with her mental health, her quality of life but Tiny can mother. She can mother and protect and foster her owl baby while continuing to be oppressed for her sensibilities, her values, her sexuality, her background.

Tiny vacillates between conforming and succumbing to melancholia and desolation to treasuring her own worth, her queerness, and valuing that her owl baby is different. Together mother and daughter feast on what nature intended them while continuing to be oppressed by the medical establishment, by patriarchy, by heterosexism, by bland nothingness.

Tiny and Chouette (her owl baby) are both queens and together they will take on their suburbs, their world and not be beaten down by wonder bread, by judgement, by what is the "right" way to live.

This is suburban horror mixed with psychological insights, sociological understandings and a trip to the dark fierce parts that lay within all of us.

Fucking brilliant and brave Ms. Oshetsky ! A novel that will disgust, tantalize, challenge and an antidote to the shame that lies dormant in many of us.

Ps...listen to the music mentioned throughout the novel (you won't be sorry)