Publishers Weekly
04/05/2021
In Taddeo’s underwhelming debut novel (after the nonfiction narrative Three Women), a re-traumatized woman faces her painful past. Joan, 37, leaves New York City for Los Angeles after her boss, Vic, with whom she had been having an affair, shoots himself in front of her at a restaurant. Witnessing Vic’s death brings back memories for Joan, who lost her parents to a gruesome act of violence when she was 10, which left her orphaned and with a sizable inheritance. Joan believes a young woman named Alice, a yoga teacher in L.A., whom she’d never met, holds the key to understanding the night of her parents’ death, and the reason is initially withheld from the reader as well as Alice, after the two women form a superficial intimacy revolving around men and how terrible they are. Unfortunately, Alice suffers from thin characterization that renders her little more than a device for Joan’s development. And though the men are certainly horrible, especially the ones in Joan’s life—including her dead father—Taddeo misses an opportunity for a more critical exploration of female rage, relying instead on the shock value of the third act’s violent scenes. Recent novels such as A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers have treated similar themes with more imagination and depth. Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners. (June)
From the Publisher
A provocative exploration of what happens when women are pushed beyond the brink, and what comes after the reckoning.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“A propulsive literary thriller . . . Taddeo’s debut novel is fearless.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Animal will confirm Taddeo’s status as a pre-eminent channeller of women’s interior lives. . . . This book is a raging, funny and fierce thriller with a protagonist whose life force, against extraordinary odds—always in the gaze and sometimes the grasp of predatory, abusive men—is a thing of wonder.”
—Isabel Berwick, Financial Times
“With skill and insight, Taddeo examines how the savagery of men fuels female rage. The result is as intimate as it is explosive.”
—People (Book of the Week)
“Like if Joan Didion got into hard drugs and carried a switchblade everywhere.”
—Keely Weiss, Harper’s Bazaar
“[A] propulsive, fiercely confident debut novel . . . Joan’s voice is so sharp and magnetic that the reader will follow her anywhere. . . . Taddeo’s prose glitters. She has a gift for aphorism, the observation that astonishes.”
—Jennifer Haigh, The New York Times Book Review
“Intoxicating . . . It’s impossible to talk about Animal without talking about 2019’s Three Women. That book, which follows the sexual and emotional lives of women, became the kind of cultural phenomenon that will forever follow Lisa Taddeo. Animal flows out of its predecessor, but where Women deals with the perils of heteronormative gender politics, Animal deals in the ways the system pushes women to the brink; and where Women is in conversation with #MeToo, Animal is in conversation with the anger that follows the reckoning.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Animal is a viscerally satisfying depiction of female rage and a gripping exploration of what it’s like to endure male violence that is both mundane and life-altering.”
—New York magazine
“Astonishing . . .The writing is so engaging on the sentence level that when you sink into the larger argument the Taddeo is making you can’t help but feel something akin to awe. Read this one.”
—Lisa Levy, CrimeReads
“Animal growls a feral truth, a promise of revenge, and an untold story of rage, and a reckoning.”
—Julia Hass, Lithub
“Riveting . . . Propulsive, erotic, emotional . . . Joan is almost impossible to look away from on every page.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Taddeo creates impressive suspense. . . . A provocative novel of sex, love, and rage for readers drawn to psychologically rich, feminist literary fiction.”
—Booklist
“A brilliant if uncomfortable provocation, sometimes messily intense but willing to take risks; likely to stir talk—and argument. . . . For readers, the result is relentless but never wearing, not preachment but real lived pain, and akin to standing in a hurricane with razor blades flying. There’s blood at the end—and a glimmer of self-affirmation.”
—Library Journal
“Fearless, sexy, brutal, and just forensically observed.”
—Jojo Moyes, author of The Giver of Stars
“Animal is sprawling id, a carnal and frank account of the uneasy marriage of memory and violence.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
PRAISE FOR LISA TADDEO AND THREE WOMEN:
“A breathtaking and important book . . . What a fine thing it is to be enthralled by another writer’s sentences. To be stunned by her intellect and heart.”
—Cheryl Strayed
“I can’t remember the last time a book affected me as profoundly as Three Women. Lisa Taddeo is a tireless reporter, a brilliant writer, and a storyteller possessed of almost supernatural humanity. As far as I’m concerned, this is a nonfiction literary masterpiece at the same level as In Cold Blood—and just as suspenseful, bone-chilling, and harrowing, in its own way. I know already that I will never stop thinking about the women profiled in this story—about their sexual desire, their emotional pain, their strength, their losses. I saw myself in all of them. Truly, Three Women is an extraordinary offering.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert
“An astonishing work of literary reportage . . . As Lisa Taddeo writes about her subjects, the women she uses to map out an anthropological, humane, passionate study of female desire, she seems almost to inhabit them. . . . A fascinating appraisal of a subject few writers have approached so intently.”
—Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“The hottest book of the summer . . . Taddeo spent eight years reporting this groundbreaking book, moving across the country and back again in her staggeringly intimate foray into the sexual lives and desires of three ‘ordinary’ women. Tragedy and despair lurk in each of their stories, but Taddeo’s dynamic writing brings them all to breathtaking life.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Taddeo spent a decade immersed in the sex lives of three ordinary American woman. . . . The result is the most in-depth look at the female sex drive and all its accompanying social, emotional, reproductive, and anthropological implications that’s been published in decades. But it’s also fully immersive: gonzo journalism without the machismo.”
—New York
“A dazzling achievement . . . Three Women burns a flare-bright path through the dark woods of women’s sexuality. In sentences that are as sharp—and bludgeoning, at times—as an ax, she retains the accuracy and integrity of nonfiction but risks the lyrical depths of prose and poetry.”
—Margaret Wappler, Los Angeles Times
“A revolutionary look at women’s desire, this feat of journalism reveals three women who are carnal, brave, and beautifully flawed.”
—People (Book of the Week)
“An extraordinary study of female desire . . . To write this kind of nonfiction—it’s true, but reads like a novel—Taddeo smartly employs not only interviews but also diary entries, legal documents, letters, emails and text messages. The result is a book as exhaustively reported and as elegantly written as Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. . . . Taddeo’s language is at its best—sublime, even—when she describes the pain of desire left unfulfilled.”
—Elizabeth Flock, The Washington Post
“Three Women reads like a nonfiction novel in the deeply embedded, richly detailed vein of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. . . . It’s Taddeo’s deep, almost feverish commitment to detail and context that elevates the stories, making them feel not just painfully real but revelatory. In her efforts to explore ‘the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments,’ she actually does much more: By peeling back the layers with such clear-eyed compassion, Taddeo illuminates the essential, elemental mystery of what it is to be a woman in the world.”
—Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
“Three Women is a battle cry. . . . Taddeo never judges. She doesn’t slip into pseudopsychological frameworks for sex. She inhabits her subjects. And if you think her topic sounds a little louche, or isn’t quite your thing, the true magic of this book may lie less in the subject matter and more in the style. . . . It’s the literary brilliance of the book that will knock you back–how she channels these women’s voices through her own. . . . For anyone who thinks they know what women want, this book is an alarm, and its volume is turned all the way up.”
—Lea Carpenter, Time
“Searing . . . The stories of Taddeo’s subjects, Sloane, Lina and Maggie, all feature the illicit—threesomes, dominance and submission, underage sex—and each includes a hefty dose of good old-fashioned adultery. . . . The result is effective and affecting. . . . Taddeo reveals an avalanche of evidence, as if we needed more, that the cozy comforts of marriage and its defining, confining attribute, monogamy, provide the perfect petri dish for combustible sex—with someone other than your spouse.”
—New York Times Book Review
“If it is not the best book about women and desire that has ever been written, then it is certainly the best book about the subject that I have ever come across. When I picked it up, I felt I’d been waiting half my life to read it; when I put it down, it was as though I had been disemboweled. . . . There isn’t a woman alive who won’t recognize—her stomach lurching, her heart beating wildly—something of what Maggie, Lina, and Sloane go through.”
—Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
“A heartbreaking, gripping, astonishing masterpiece, Three Women is destined to join the canon both of journalistic excellence and feminist literature.”
—Esquire
Library Journal
05/14/2021
DEBUT After the highly regarded Three Women, a nonfiction portrait of female sexual experience, Taddeo offers a debut novel that is a ruthlessly exact study of the damage done to women—and that women sometimes do to themselves—in the search for love and belonging. As Joan sits in a New York restaurant with a man she professes to love, her longtime paramour enters and commits a horrific act of violence that sends Joan scurrying cross-country to find Alice, a woman she has only heard of but who she believes will help sort out her life. After settling into a dodgy abode in the Los Angeles hills, Joan locates the gorgeous, sharp-tongued Alice, with whom she forms an initially clingy, ultimately significant relationship. Along the way, the narrative unfolds a dark and scarring secret from Joan's childhood, while showing how the very prospect of violence and violation defines the female experience. "There are rapes, and then there are the rapes we allow to happen, the ones we shower and get ready for," observes Alice. There is rape here—Taddeo spares us nothing—and there is also sympathetic if unruly Joan's dangerous propensity for self-sabotage: she sometimes has lurid visions of sex and forms ill-considered attachments to men who aren't really there for her, failing to recognize the abuse she subsequently suffers. For readers, the result is relentless but never wearing, not preachment but real lived pain, and akin to standing in a hurricane with razor blades flying. There's blood at the end—and a glimmer of self-affirmation. VERDICT Offering a gutsily refocused look at the male—female power exchange, Taddeo brings Joan to awareness and some agency, challenging women to reconsider assumptions and desires framed by men even as she viscerally registers all the reasons for women's anger. A brilliant if uncomfortable provocation, sometimes messily intense but willing to take risks; likely to stir talk—and argument.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
2021-03-17
An alluring, sophisticated, sexually voracious, and emotionally ruined woman moves to California to track down a connection to her tragic past.
After finding critical and popular nonfiction success with Three Women (2019), Taddeo makes her fiction debut with a propulsive, erotic, emotional thriller focusing on a 37-year-old woman. Joan is fleeing New York after having watched her married lover shoot himself while she was out to dinner with his replacement, but this horrific experience is the tip of a very large iceberg with layers of trauma that began when she lost both parents at age 10. As Joan puts it, "If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use." She rents a little house in Topanga Canyon on a large piece of property that is also home to a well-known rapper, a hot guy in a yurt, and a wealthy older man who has recently lost his wife. Once unpacked, she almost immediately runs into the person she went there looking for—a young woman named Alice, who she believes can help her understand what happened to her parents. Taddeo balances the sex, violence, and melodrama of her plot with insightful character development. Joan is almost impossible to look away from on every page. "When I saw boys in the streets with their low-slung backpacks, I thought of the girls they liked, the girls who got to be eleven and twelve and thirteen, with unicorn stickers and slap bracelets. I did not get to be any of those ages. I was ten and then I was thirty, and then I was thirty-seven." Or this: "I knew the precise color I wanted my coffee and how to have an orgasm in under thirty seconds. I needed everybody in the world—including waiters—less than they needed me." If the story goes off the rails in the final chapters, the burning questions driving it are satisfyingly answered.
As full of sensuality, amorality, and drama as its riveting narrator.
