About This Book

Is the mother growing more hair, sharper canines, a tail? She thinks so, but her husband laughs off her concerns. Home with her toddler son while her husband travels for work every week, the mother is dealing with a certain kind of despair. She laments the dream job she gave up to be a full-time parent, and the art she misses making. This maybe-turning-into-a-dog thing adds curious flavor to the monotony, though, and leads her to her comforting new library-found companions, the wild and true stories in The Field Guide to Magical Women. And her son loves their new game, playing dog, lessening the mother's despair despite feared judgment from playground mommies and her husband. After a night of bounding and sniffing through her small town on four legs, she wakes up as her woman-self, now called Nightbitch. Yoder's first novel finds catharsis in pushing reality to its fantastic limits. The mother/Nightbitch is sublimely quotable as she skewers society's devaluation of caretaking work and realizes that her art and her life could be the same thing.

From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.