CHOUETTE

Narrator Julia Whelan conveys the hallucinatory beauty of Oshetsky's unsettling fever dream of a novel. Tiny, a concert cellist, is pregnant, but her pregnancy is different. Thanks to a dream encounter with an owl-woman, she is now having an owl-baby. From the outset, Whelan's steady, intense tone introduces a note of foreboding, which is realized with the birth of the tenacious, ugly, and deeply unnerving Chouette. This audiobook is a meditation on the darker realities of motherhood--boredom, fear, loneliness, and uncertainty. Whelan captures this complexity, sensitively rendering Tiny's despair and also her single-minded determination to honor Chouette's essential nature, despite society's pressure to do otherwise. Listeners will be enthralled by this phantasmagoric story, exquisitely told and luminous, despite its brutality. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine [Published: JANUARY 2022]