Emma Starling was once believed to have healing powers. But now that she’s gone to medical school, her gift seems to have faded. When Emma’s father is diagnosed with a fatal brain disease, she returns home in the hopes she can do something to save him. But between Emma’s uncertainty, her father’s hallucinations of animals and ghosts, and her missing high school friend, Emma wonders if she can do anything to help her small New Hampshire town.

OBSESSED. This book is completely bizarre and unexpected and bonkers in the absolute best way. The narrative voice is fascinating and somehow feels like a warm hug, and the sense of humor is sheer perfection. As things got weirder and weirder, I got more and more invested in Emma and her strange hometown. I never wanted this book to end!

I attempted to read this book by Annie Hartnett, Unlikely Animals. After a few chapters I had to give up, as it just wasn't resonating with me. I can't give anyone low stars though, as each author works hard and has a fan base that resonates with their work. So this one gets three stars as it just wasn't for me. Thanks to NetGalley.

This was such an interesting read! It follows the old trope of returning to a small town after college, but with a twist: the main character, Emma, has a healing power known as the Charm. She returns to her hometown because her father is sick with a mysterious illness, one that causes him to hallucinate animals as well as see the local ghosts. As her father's condition worsens, he becomes more obsessed with the case of Emma's high school best friend's disappearance, drawing Emma into the amateur investigation he's conducting. The story is alternately told by Emma, her father, and the ghosts that inhabit the Everton cemetery, watching over the living residents. This novel was a delightful portrayal of grief, love, and complicated relationships. It made me laugh multiple times. Definitely recommend it for people who enjoy magical realism and literary fiction!

I really enjoyed the historical references in this book, and learned a lot about the quirks of the town and its previous inhabitants. The dead talk to each other in the graveyard, which might have been more of a unique, fun plot device if I hadn't already read Fannie Flagg's The Whole Town's Talking which uses the same gimmick. Some of her writing here was really good even the fantastical elements worked. I could have done without the gimmicks.

This is a new favorite for 2022. I’m recommending it to all my friends and talking it up in bookstores and libraries. The protagonist, Emma Starling, was born with a gift for healing. But somewhere along the way, everything went wrong, and she has lost her gift and her life direction, and now she is home caring for her dying father with her snarky brother, judgmental mother, and hoping to find her once best friend who has unaccountably disappeared.

Emma is charming and funny. The ghosts and spirits who surround her are startlingly believable. I was cheering for her and the other characters the whole time.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Emma Starling was born with a magical ability to heal, but having lost touch with her ability, as well as her general purpose in life, she returns home to Everton, New Hampshire. Back home, she’s reunited with her newly sober brother, judgmental mother, and father, whose terminal brain disease includes frequent hallucinations of small animals and a friendship with the ghost of naturalist Earnest Harold Baynes. Emma’s childhood friend, Crystal, has been missing, and in a town rocked by the opioid crisis, her father is the only one who seems to be looking for her, plastering her face on posters around town. When Emma takes on a position as a long term substitute in town and more responsibility over her father’s care, it begins to seem like she may be in Everton longer than she had originally planned.

I stumbled upon Hartnett’s first book, Rabbit Cake, a few years ago when it was on display on my local indie, and I adored it. Her sophomore novel has a lot of the same irreverent wit and charm, though the storyline here is more complex. And it was fantastic (any vagueness here is because I don’t want to spoil anything). Unlikely Animals is narrated by a chorus of ghosts, and blends ambitious storylines that pulls together the storylines of nuanced, realistic, characters. I had the pleasure of attending one of Annie Hartnett’s launch events, and she shared that she was going for something Irving-esque with this novel. And she nailed it. She also brought fox drawings, so bonus points for that, too 🦊

Even though the major players here are all adults, we still get the immense pleasure of Hartnett’s depiction of children throughout this book. Though the topics in this one are pretty heavy, the way that Hartnett brought this story to life was engaging and fun.

I read this mostly via audio, and the narration by Mark Bramhall and Kirby Heyborne is exceptional.

If you’re into quirky family sagas with a healthy dose of historical fiction and some mild magical realism and exotic pets, pick this one up.

Thanks to Ballantine via NetGalley for a digital ARC to review. All opinions are mine.

I had not read Hartnett before so this was a weirdly wonderful book to read! Emma is a "healer" who has lost her touch and drops out of school to return home to her aging father. That's really all the plot you need as there are so many humorous events that can't be done justice with a summary! Needless to say, it's heartwarming in all the best ways; it will make you laugh, shed a tear or two, and just generally leave you with joy. And let's face it, that's what the world needs more of in these trying times! Can't wait to read more of her!
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

UNLIKELY ANIMALS is a beautiful, tender, quirky, mordantly funny, and bighearted novel with a cast of instantly memorable characters. Or as the ghostly narrators say, it’s “both funny and sad, the kind of story we like best.” A wholly original story about family, friendship, and mortality – reading this book is a magical, one-of-a-kind experience. It’s perfect for anyone who loved Lincoln in the Bardo, Mostly Dead Things, or Nothing To See Here.

This book is really fun and quirky. But it's also pretty serious. Sort of. It's like an outsider's view of New Hampshire. I have no idea what a NH native would think of this, but I'm going to guess. Either they have a sense of humor and will love it, or it may be totally offensive at times. There are ghosts and the main character has a healing power (which she seems to have lost), so there's some magical realism going on.

Emma returns home to her small town in NH. Her father is sick. It turns out her childhood friend is missing. The graveyard ghosts give a running commentary on the things that are happening in town. The local science teacher has a goat that he treats like a dog. It's funny. I definitely recommend it.

Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett is so sweet & charming, I just loved it! Well developed (and likable) characters that are funny, troubled, confused, frustrated and all the other emotions of life mixed in while they all try to do the best they can with what they are dealt.

When Emma was young she had “the gift of touch” which has failed her in adult life as she struggles to maintain the charade of attending medical school while she flounders doing nothing. Called back to her small-town upbringing because her father is dying, Emma learns to reconnect with her past and finds hope and encouragement along the way.

There’s so much more to this story than Emma. The whole town is involved, even the lovely spirits down at the Maple Street cemetery. Sitting on their graves, cheering on (or at least observing) the goings-on of their beloved small town. Then there’s all the animals, real & imagined, that accompany our main characters through thick & thin. There’s even a mystery twist and a few romances thrown in! This book addresses it all without getting too dark with the harder parts of life. Without a doubt a must-read for 2022. Don’t miss the authors note at the beginning (or the one at the end) to find out the interesting historical accuracies that are woven into Unlikely Animals. (Makes the whole book so much more fun!)

Thank you to #Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

A fantasy, family drama, mystery, and rom-com in one, Unlikely Animals follows the Starling family as they each reconcile with various personal struggles. Emma, the main protagonist, has recently dropped out of med school. Her brother, Auggie, is seven months sober, and not everyone is as supportive of his recovery as they could be. Her father, Clive, is dying from an undetermined brain disease that causes vivid, absurd hallucinations (including small animals and the ghost of Ernest Harold Baynes). Her mother, Ingrid, is struggling to cope with Clive’s degenerating health and the adventures that ensure when Clive follows or takes the advice of Ernest Harold Bayes’s ghost. Her best friend from high school has gone missing. Police have back-burned her case, citing the drugs found in her trailer as a reason to suspect she ran away. But Emma and Clive are convinced there is much more to the story. 

The story is filtered through a chorus of ghosts confined to a local graveyard. Unable to leave the premises, these ghosts can evidently access any living person’s thoughts and leverage this capability to narrate the story. Because the ghosts cannot actually engage in the action, they have few stakes beyond their own entertainment. This distance allows Hartnett to craft a tragic storyline with a lighthearted tone, but the need for the graveyard narrators was otherwise unclear to me. It's Auggie's character who makes this book worth reading. 

Hartnett's depiction of a town affected by the opioid epidemic and characters grappling with substance use disorder is realistic and empathetic. Auggie’s addiction to opioids started with a sports injury and a prescription for painkillers that consumed years of his life. From his family’s perspective, his track record of relapses looms over the seven months of sobriety he has achieved. But, over the course of the narrative, he proves to be a complex character who provides strength, support, and insight to other characters. A nuanced and thoughtful discussion about a national crisis embedded in an accessible, entertaining tragi-comedy, Unlikely Animals is both whimsically irreverent and urgently prevalent.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

"A lost young woman returns to small-town New Hampshire under the strangest of circumstances in this one-of-a-kind novel of life, death, and whatever comes after from the acclaimed author of Rabbit Cake."

Such a beautiful story of how people, animals and nature interact. Sometimes a bit too closely! A family, a few secrets, loyalty and finding your place in the world set this story in motion. Moments of both laughter and tears connected me to this story and had me not wanting it to end!

This is, and will stay, a favorite book for me. One of my Goodreads categories is "quirky" and only the best are recognized, because quirky can easily fall into "dorky" or "jerky" or "malarky." Only the finest of writers can pull off quirky and Hartnett is one. Emma is coming home because her father has a brain disease that will kill him, eventually. Emma Starling was born with a "minor" ability to heal by the laying on of hands. She left her little hometown of Everton, New Hampshire for Pomona College in California, graduated and got into medical school in California. Emma's father Clive had been a poetry professor in the English Department of nearby Meriden College.

We know early on that Clive started hallucinating, saw cats all over his classroom one day and his ensuing behavior and the scene he caused led to his early retirement. Clive's wife, Ingrid, a librarian at the college, also oversees the care of the Corbin Mansion and the family lives in the caretaker house. Emma's brother Auggie is a recovering drug addict. Auggie and Emma are in their early twenties and are not close. A couple of other key characters in this novel are the ghost of Ernest Harold Baynes, known as Harold, a former naturalist who died in 1925 at age 57 and Crystal Nash, Emma's former best friend, who is missing.

Clive befriends Harold and is desperately looking for Crystal who was like another daughter to the family. No one else sees Harold. Everyone else dismisses Crystal's disappearance as that of a junkie who didn't matter and is probably dead. Clive obsessively and persistently puts up flyers and goes door to door looking for her. Clive is a Black Sabbath fan and was formerly in a cover band. He's lost this and, because of his littering public and private property with flyers and his eccentric behavior when he hallucinates animals, he is barred from a lot of places. Despite this sad fact, Clive's illness and the ways it makes him behave lend dark humor to the book throughout. Meanwhile, Clive not too long ago had an affair that has caused much pain in his fourth and most successful marriage. Ingrid is struggling with the simultaneous desire to take care of him and to dump him. Emma is furious at him. Auggie is a bit hard to read. He mostly plays video games. That changes.

Everton is culturally odd, with most of its money coming from a gun factory (the Corbins) and much of its fame from Harold, who always had a massive wild animal collection, most notably a fox called the Sprite. Off to one side of town is an extremely private 26000 acre game preserve and complex of millionaire's homes. In the center of town is the Maple Street Cemetery, which offers some information on the townspeople and its history throughout the book. The author will admit that she channeled Thornton Wilder at some point in her writing, and as a former "Emily" in an eleventh grade production, I'd say this novel is very much a tribute to his play, "Our Town" in several respects.

The problem with a good quirky book is that telling too much of the story also gives away the giggly quirky parts. Unlikely animals is about a family, a community, a fabulous fifth grade class, coming of age, perception versus reality and learning that reality is itself quirky. It's about a hilarious community theater production, a less hilarious small town drug problem, a mystery (Crystal) and more. Throughout, unbelievably believable excerpts of Harold's 1920s nature writing and photos of him with Sprite, with bears and of his wife are included to add to the character of the Everton itself. This is a totally complete, totally quirky, very moving and beautifully written and drawn/photographed book. I've ordered it already to share with friends and just to have.

In Unlikely Animals, Hartnett's irresistible, oddball tragicomedy with heart, characters explore the limits and solidity of friendship and family loyalty, show mistakes and imperfections, and cling to hope.

Emma Starling is a former natural healer whose abilities have disappeared, and she's also a recent med-school dropout. It's not that she couldn't hack medical school--she just didn't go the first day, or the second, or any day after that. Now she's scrabbling to make ends meet in California and drifting a little bit--oh, and she's been telling her parents about fictitious classes she's been attending at the medical school she isn't going to.

Emma returns to small-town New Hampshire to care for her father Clive, who is dying. He's also vividly hallucinating small animals and the speaking specter of a long-dead local naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, who is advising Clive about how to spend his final days, sometimes through making daring and eccentric decisions.

When she arrives home, somewhat shamed by her lies; concerned about her parents' marriage, her brother's recent bout with addiction, and her father's health; and without a direction for her future, Emma discovers that her beloved but estranged best friend from high school is missing. The local authorities aren't particularly inclined to search for opioid drug addicts like Crystal--in fact, no one besides Emma and her dad seems to believe that Crystal is still alive.

The many ghosts’ chatter and commentary (always with their born and died dates following their names in parentheses, which I loved) felt like echoes of Lincoln in the Bardo, but the tone of Unlikely Animals is quite different; warm-hearted (yet never cloyingly sweet).

A minor nitpick: the fifth graders in the book seemed far younger to me—their matching outfits, reverting to sucking thumbs after a crisis, free use of each other's last initials, innocence about aspects of the world, and so on—but I adored them.

I was hooked, witnessing Hartnett's delightfully faulted, oddball characters making their way in a messy world. Father and daughter, brother and sister, and mother and father find their way back together after hurting each other, making mistakes, misunderstanding intentions, and losing their individual paths. The characters insist on hope, allow for reinvention, and leave room for the inexplicable and the wondrous.

Hartnett evokes a sense of place so strong, the town felt like a character itself.

Unlikely Animals is sweet and wonderfully strange, and Hartnett employs a light touch and thoughtful approach to addressing potentially heavy, dark issues. This book made me smile over and over.

Annie Hartnett is also the author of Rabbit Cake.

I received a prepublication digital copy of this book (published April 12) courtesy of Random House Publishing Group: Ballantine Books and NetGalley.

This book really grew on me. At first I thought it had too much going on (narrated by ghosts, small town antics, opioid crisis, missing person mystery, family drama, love story, healing powers, plus biographical info about a real person). But by the end I really cared about Emma and her family and I especially loved her fifth grade class. Full of humor and heart, I’m glad I stuck with it.

One of my favorite reads so far of 2022! I was initially attracted by the cute little illustrated foxes on the cover, but the colorful characters drew me in. Weaving in the true story of a New Hampshire Dr. Doolittle along with narration by colorful deceased townsfolk (not quite ghosts, more like guardian angels), the stories of Emma trying to find herself after bailing on her family's expectations, her brother's recovery from addiction, her parents' failing marriage, her father's mysterious brain disease, and a missing best friend the town has written off as dead come to life. While so many storylines can be difficult to maintain, somehow Annie Hartnett did it masterfully and wove them all together. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll cheer for both people and animals alike. If anything read it to find out what happens when you feed a deer corn puffs in your kitchen!. Thank you #NetGalley and #BallantineBooks @Penguinrandom for the opportunity to read and review this quirky cool ARC!

Unlikely Animals—Annie Harnett

Unlikely Animals is an imaginative, warm, whimsical novel that tackles dark topics, such as opioid addiction and death, without being glib. This accomplishment is due, in part, to the chorus of the departed, residing in the small New Hampshire town’s cemetery, engaging the reader in a running commentary on the lives of the living.

The story line follows a young woman, Emma, her life off track, who returns home to see her dying father who, because of a brain disease, is hallucinating. He is also regularly visited by one to the town’s eminent, but departed, citizens. The rest of her family—a stressed mother and recovering-from-opioid-addiction brother—have been coping as best they can with the unpredictable, sometimes outrageous, behavior of the father. His primary mission is to find a missing friend of Emma’s—and the entire family—who has disappeared and is presumed to have died from a heroin overdose. As Emma settles back into life in a town she hoped to leave forever, becoming a long-term substitute for a group of challenging fifth-graders, she finds a version of herself that is much more comfortable than the “specialness’ with which she started her journey.

Harnett manages to bring us a story in which we are happy to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the tale in the world she creates.

A genre I haven’t come back to in a long time and is halfway through my comfort zone as well, unlikely animals was a breath of fresh air and allowed me to venture my reading habits in a new direction.

Thank you to NetGalley and random house for the review copy of unlikely animals.

The story goes as follows:
A young woman returns back to her home town to be there for her dad who is slowly fading out. Emma starling is lost in the direction of life and through her beautiful journey in the book, she’s able to find herself as well as get her family and friends on track.

The story is mixed with snippets of the naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes who had a lot of animals in his house and his quirky episodes with their temperaments.
The mix of history and story gave the book a different dimension and I loved that combination.
The book does touch up on topic of drug addiction especially heroin. The author has beautifully handled this issue and you appreciate the honest details the character in this book have.
Emma and her journey to find herself is a path that makes you introspect your life as well. We’ve all been there or rather are there trying to figure out the next steps in our life. There is always that one moment in our childhood that everyone remembers that sort of forges our path in education but sometimes you grow up and want different things. That’s the point that Emma’s life brings about and which touched my heart.
The snippets about the people in the graveyard trying to protect the town added a different tinge in the book which made it more likely as well!
Lastly to all the wonderful animals mentioned in the book, you have my ♥️. Knowing me, I appreciate a book or series that gives me insight into how animals live their life and this book gave me all the feels in this department!

** thank you NetGalley and Ballantine Books for giving me an early copy in exchange for my honest review **

This book has been very comforting, leaving you with warm feelings and an eagerness to hug your furry friends. It has a well-known trope of a formerly golden child returning to her small town feeling lost but with a smidge of magic realism, quirky characters, humor, and a mystery. The story is told from the perspective of the ghosts from the town’s cemetery, they don't meddle but they watch and discuss the town’s troubles. This book covers themes such as mental illness, loss, infidelity, family, drug addiction, and friendship.

I felt with this book like I was reading short stories that intertwined, small-town adventures with one big plot that involved everyone, which was the disappearance of Crystal, Emma’s childhood best friend. Since it's told from the ghost’s perspective, they are involved with multiple characters' lives, so you don't know if what you are being told is useful facts and sometimes they weren't. I did think that the story would have a little more of a suspenseful vibe and I thought the way it resolved was too simple like the characters just stumbled into the resolution that made everything better and I wanted a little more drama. However, I still enjoyed the ride and had fun getting to know these characters, including the ghosts that gave this story some pizazz.

I loved Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett and was thrilled to receive the ARC of Unlikely Animals. It follows Emma as she returns home to New Hampshire after being in California for several years. Emma was born with The Charm - the ability to heal people by touch. It was never strong enough to heal major illnesses, but it seemed to help people. Now she's returning home to her ill father and she knows her family expects her to try the Charm on him. But Emma knows she's lost it and doesn't want to disappoint them.

There are a lot of great characters in Unlikely Animals. As with any small town there are a lot of eccentric people. I loved getting to know so many of them throughout the story. I do not want to give anything away about the plot. It is a story to be discovered by the reader. If you love stories set in small towns, character driven, and everyone marches to their own beat this book is for you.

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!