Oshetsky's writing is whimsical, tender, and able to transport me between two states-of-mind: the one I had as a child, and the one I have as an adult capable of reflecting on my past.

The story begins with four-year-old Margaret accidentally being involved in a life-changing tragedy that alters the course of her future. Later on, older Margaret attempts to confess the truth about what happened, but Poor Deer - an ominous, deer figure with yellow teeth - refuses to allow Margaret to lie to herself about the accident.

A beautiful, yet mournful, tale of grief, loss, and connecting our older selves to the kids we used to be, Poor Deer is a wonderful exploration of the connection between imagination, guilt, and reflection.

A really fresh and clever narrative structure - the epitome of unreliable narrator. I always love a child narrator, because it lays out the moral lessons with greater purity and innocence. A sad portrait of motherhood and family bonds, the book always leaves you wanting more from the characters in the way they behave and treat others. Definitely not a feel good novel, but an interesting premise and hugely reflective.

A mix of plot-character driven, flaws of character a main focus, complicated character development.

🌟🌟🌟🌟
Have you ever wished you could change the ending to your own story? For Margaret, there are multiple narratives she would rewrite—but they all originate with a single choice she made as a child, that changed the outlook of the rest of her life. Unfortunately for her, Poor Deer is standing over her as she recount these stories to the reader & ready to redirect her back to the truth when Margaret’s story wanders from it.

This was a really cool premise for a book, and it’s one that I didn’t feel I fully “got” until I had finished it. It’s so easy to forget about Margaret’s tendency to revise what has happened; I’d be thinking “Wow, what a nice ending for her!” up until Poor Deer would appear and force reality back to the surface. Margaret herself is such an interesting & nuanced character, and I oscillated between sympathy and judgement toward her actions as I read.

Thanks to @eccobooks for this ARC! I’d definitely recommend keeping an eye out for this book when it’s published on January 9th (only a few more weeks!!) ✨

Thank you to NetGalley and Ecco for this ARC!

I was drawn to request this book after seeing it was the same author that wrote Chouette, a book I read earlier this year and fell in love with.

I found Poor Deer to be a captivating and wonderfully strange tale. I enjoyed how the story slowly unfolded over the course of the book and kept me engaged to keep reading. I find Claire’s writing to be profound and incredibly witty! I would venture to say I enjoyed Poor Deer more than Chouette, but both story’s will stay with me for a while.

I highly recommend Poor Deer to those how love literary fiction and magical realism!

4,5/5 stars. I LOVED most of this book. Poor Deer follows a girl who was involved in a friends death at age 4, and grapples with the trauma of the event throughout her adolescence/early adulthood. The writing is beautiful and honest, and the only thing i didn’t enjoy was the ending, but that’s personal preference! I love books where the MC is a child and this is no exception! Definitely going to pick up this authors other work. I would recommend checking Poor Deer out when it releases in a couple of weeks if you are into fairytales, stories about grief/trauma, or just looking for a short, impactful read!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book, releasing in January 2024!

Chouette was a top 10 book of the year for me last year, and I still think about it CONSTANTLY-it was so unlike anything I had read before. I was so excited to get an ARC of Poor Deer, and while it's a different book from Chouette I still really enjoyed it. It has some of the same unsettling undertone (kind of dark fairytale vibes I suppose?), and is similarly located (at least in the first part of the novel) within a family setting with memorable cameos from people in the wider community-I really love Oshetsky's writing and the way she communicates the interior world of her characters. This is a tender novel about guilt and grief and the ways in which we search for redemption and how we write and rewrite the stories of our own lives. Definitely recommended!

I find it interesting it's marketed as magical and hopeful, and many reviewers are saying it's fairytale-like. To me, there's something very off about the writing style, and I agree with the one reviewer who said it felt claustrophobic. I thought it was literary horror that didn't quite hit the mark—messy, repetitive, and pretentious. I seem to be in the minority here with this one, though, so I still recommend it to horror fans.

Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky was an amazing read. This story felt fresh and oh so different than anything I'd read before. Four year old Margaret is overwhelmed with guilt from an accident that she had no idea would end of leaving her friend Agnes dead.
Her mother keeps telling she did nothing wrong and her guilt ends up manifesting itself in the form of an imaginary goat that never leaves. It's her conscious and shame all wrapped around this goat. I wasn't sure how this would end, but Oshetsky did so skillfully.

This is a dark fairytale, but - like every good fairytale - it is sweet and tender too.

"This is a story about two little girls on the day of the schoolyard flood. It begins like this: (...) Paint me a mill town nestled in a bend of a river called Penobscot about as far east as you can imagine and three hours north of anywhere you’ve ever heard of."

I won't spoil, but something awful happens. It's about guilt and memory and trauma and revenge, and mostly about the stories we tell ourselves.

I enjoyed it very much: it manages to be light and serious at the same time, but also modern and timeless at the same time, with quirky side characters, surprising turns, fun choice of words, but also some pretty tough themes.

4,5

Wow! I was blown away with this book. The writing is amazing, Oshetsky is a wordsmith! I can see this author winning at every word game she’s ever played. She put words together that were so simple yet so descriptive. They drew me right in, and kept me riveted to the story. And what a story it is. A young girl is being raised by her mother and aunt. Before she is old enough to enter school something horrible happens to her best friend. Something she will blame herself for throughout this book. What an incredible look at how carrying guilt and shame can take on a life of its own. Loved it!

I loved Chouette and told so many people about it. Now the author has outdone herself with this sad, wonderful, heartfelt novel. I love the prose and how the author thinks. The only gripe I have , is that I wish it could be longer. I can't wait till she writes a long novel.

Astounding, haunting, engrossing. You'll fall headlong into this book and feel like you're waking up from the most intensely real dream when you turn the last page. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity.

Another great book by Claire Oshetsky! I enjoyed this story so much. It felt like reading a very dark fairy tale. Highly recommend reading this!

I’m on my pogo stick again, yahoo!

This, this here is why I love books. This story is just magical! It took me out of my life and into the head of a girl named Margaret, who as a very young kid was part of something bad that happened. For the rest of her life, guilt engulfed her. An ugly creature, named Poor Deer, is Margaret’s conscience, and he sits in corners and tortures her with words, insisting she fess up. He has hooves and yellow nubs for teeth. I can still see him, he is so vivid with his hideous presence.

Now, I was tempted to hit Poor Deer over the head with my pogo stick, because I grew very attached to Margaret and wanted him to knock it off, leave her alone. But I knew Margaret’s heart and soul needed him there. He was both infuriating and fascinating.

It’s ingenious the way the author made this all work. She has this amazing imagination, and something about how she develops her characters (and my attachment to them) made this hard-to-please realist enamored. Magical realism is a hard sell for me, but sometimes it hits me just so, like it did here, and I’m all in. Also, this book has a fairy tale quality to it, which is almost always a no sale for me. But surprising myself, I loved the fairy-tale-ness of it all. It’s hard to describe this book. Oshetsky creates a world that is off-kilter, dark, intense, and riveting. And she does so with beauteous, powerful language.

Margaret is an odd and quiet kid who lives with her not-so-loving mother and her kinder aunt. She has made up her own written language. And she makes up stories with their own happy endings; sometimes you can’t be sure that what appears to be happening in the here and now isn’t just a made-up tale that’s inside Margaret’s head. It played with my own head in the best possible way. And I could see the writer going back and forth with the storyline, which felt authentic and artful and somehow quite cozy. Luckily, the game of reality vs. make-believe didn’t interfere with the plot or the cool tone of this dark and unusual story. It’s funny—all the playfulness about what was actually real created ambiguity, which is another of my most unfavorite things. But here, I was totally sold. I guess I unconsciously chose the story that I thought was real. Kudos to the writer for guiding me without my knowing it, lol. And without being pushy or in my face.

Here are some samples of how make-believe is mixed up with reality, how the line between the two is blurred:

“I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical and the facts feel like borrowed broken things picked out at random from a jumble of hearsay and old gossip.”

“And whether I’m about to be the hero of my own story, or the villain, or the sacrificial lamb, or a person of no importance who is forgotten in the end, I won’t know until I’ve come to the final page.”

Even though I’ve gotten carried away talking about reality versus make-believe, I don’t want to leave the impression that this book is all ephemeral or confusing. It’s not. There’s a strange plot that keeps moving right along, and there are dreadful mishaps that occur along the way. There are two timelines: one is the past, and one is this weird present, where Margaret is in a motel near Niagara Falls with two random people, and with Poor Deer in the corner. In fact, the motel room is the opening scene. I was grabbed immediately, as I tried to make sense of how and why she was at a motel in the middle of nowhere. The author cleverly and slowly doles out hints.

In tone, this book reminds me somewhat of The Enchanted, an enchanted book that I still have running through my veins eight years after I’ve read it. It was fun to relive that feeling with this book.

And for those of you who are fans of Oshetsky’s earlier work, Chouette, you will not be disappointed. Although the two novels are very different, this book is equally as weird and wonderful. With Chouette, I felt like I had never read anything like it. Well, I felt the same about this book.

Magical realism; a fairy-tale feel; a strange, dark plot; an intriguing and endearing main character; an off-kilter vibe: Mix those ingredients all up in a pot, and a rich and delicious broth, with real depth of flavor, emerges. That’s what we have here, in spades. I can’t wait for you all to get to read it!

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

Publication date: January 9, 2024

Take a four-year old who did something “wrong,” but at that age had no true understanding of the ramifications of the act and when she tries to tell her mother the truth, she is told a new version of the facts. She was told she never left the house the day her best friend died. The girl’s mother blamed little Margaret. Margaret’s single mother was more concerned about her friendship with the girl than paying any attention to her own child. Throughout her youth she was ostracized and lonely save for her Aunt.

With this secret, guilt and shame preying on her, her guilty conscience manifests itself as a cloven-footed goat wrapped in a blanket with yellow nubs for teeth. Poor Deer is there as a witness, as her conscience, that wants Margaret to tell the truth. Margaret, a weaver of stories from an early age, has a hard time separating fact from fiction. At age sixteen, Poor Deer has become relentless and Margaret must try to move from the fairytale in her mind.

This is an incredibly well-thought out and well-written novel. The examination of the psyche of the mother and child was deftly portrayed. It was fraught with emotion, heartbreak, and a quest for love and acceptance. I highly recommend this book.

Thank you Ecco and NetGalley for this advanced copy. All opinions are my own.

The book reminded me of Earthlings by Sayaka Murata blended with Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, though there was definitely some fairy-tale fairy-dust sprinkled in for added flavor. The word choice was whimsical and lyrical, in that sing-songey style of childhood. Yet my overall impression of the book was definitely a dark and eerie one. My main emotion while reading this was dread, though maybe not the full-throated type of dread that could impact us in adulthood…it was a light and fluffy variety of dread, one bouyed and substantiated by the innocence of the protagonist. Eerie and light like fog, this was a misty story that blurred the past and present, that levitated big burdens over our protagonist’s head. For a lot of the story, the protagonist is four years old…too young to understand a lot of the weight of what occurs, though old enough to suspect that there is a certain weight suspended over her, ready to come crashing down. The book owes its eerieness to this weightlessness…as the reader, we know this weightlessness isn’t going to last. And waiting for all that burden to come crashing down can fill the heart with dread.

And Poor Deer is always watching…

For the most part, I enjoyed reading this. I think my personal tastes have shifted a little more away from darker, more tragic atmospheres in my fiction reading (I’m gravitating toward cozy, feel-good fiction and cold-hard nonfiction lately) so my vibes simply didnt match up with the book’s as much as they would have in the past. Three stars for a solid book, I think many people will enjoy it a great deal, especially as an autumnal read.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher

First of all, Claire Oshetsky's first novel Chouette is a must read. Similarly, her second is another gut punch with so much heart that you keep going back for more.

This was lovely and such an incredible transformation from Chouette! It's more thematically and formally sophisticated and has just such a beautiful narrative voice that's a pleasure to follow along. It gets the way things are most tragic when they're paired with hopefulness, and is both deeply sad and charmingly optimistic. I particularly enjoyed the way the narrative voice and the form replicated what it's like to be a child.

I'm really excited about this book and so glad I read it. I haven't read the author's first book and didn't know what to expect, but I was taken in by the narrative voice here, and the smart use of omniscient POVs for this strange and unsettling small-town tragedy involving two little girls. I really liked the narrative tool of the protagonist starting again and again with some stories, as it feels realistic to the way people try to protect themselves and each other from the truth, and even how unreliable our own memories are. I loved the prose here and was very impressed by how creative and unique this novel feels.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc in exchange of an honest review. This novel was tragic and moving, the innocence of childhood perfectly written for an air of nostalgia that hangs even after you finish the book. Really loved it.