This is one of those books that is so good and so different that you are just amazed at the workings of the authors mind. I could not put this book down. It was very easy to get caught up in the characters and the small town setting. Emma, the main character, had gone to California for college and came home feeling like a disgrace with a giant chip on her shoulder. Auggie, her younger brother is a recovered addict and very lovable. The father, that cheating man, was so charming and funny that I forgave him his infidelity and decided to like him. Ingrid, the mother, was uptight but you couldn’t blame her—she had an unfaithful husband, a disappointing daughter and a son who did not do anything since coming home from rehab. Such an entertaining read. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I probably expected too much from Unlikely Animals because I loved everything about Hartnett’s novel, Rabbit Cake. The idea was definitely quirky which was great but I thought there were too many ideas, plots and subplots many of which seemed to have no direct impact on the whole. Emma had a miracle gift, then inexplicably she didn’t with never a clear reason as to why, there was the plot with her former best friend Crystal, and her brother’s drug problem, her mom’s leaving, her father’s brain tumor, the people in the cemetery who watched over the town, the millionaires hunting acreage which was kept as a big secret, and that’s not all. Too many irons in the fire trying to pull everything together and in my mind never quite succeeding.
What I did love was the history of the fenced in acreage that was used for hunting by a millionaires club that was indeed true as well as the original Dr. Doolittle.