Publishers Weekly
09/25/2023
When an innocent game goes awry, one young girl is left dead and the other doomed to a fantastical haunting in the restrained and unsettling latest from Oshetsky (Chouette). The survivor, Margaret, now a teen, writes her confession several years later while holed up in a motel room near Niagara Falls. “I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical,” she writes, revealing that she accidentally locked her friend Agnes in a cooler in their Maine hometown. Ever since Agnes’s death, Margaret has been haunted by Poor Deer, a devilish figment of her imagination with “mossy yellow nubs” for teeth, who seems determined to remind her of her sins. In chapters alternating between Margaret’s confession and omniscient sketches of her past, what unfolds is a fascinating and often painful tale of a tortured childhood. A child whose strangeness can be taken as innocent or sinister, she is raised by her aunt and a mother resentful of her “little changeling” daughter. Her only friend is an old man in the woods who trains messenger pigeons, and she writes tales in a cypher intelligible only to herself. Oshetky handles Margaret’s monstrous manifestation with a delicate touch and infuses her daily life with a muted eerieness. Readers will be captivated by Margaret’s beautifully weird search for atonement. Agent: Alexa Stark, Writers House. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
Beautiful, terrifying. . . . Grief is a well-trod territory in fiction, but in Oshetsky’s hands, this familiar topic becomes fresh and strange. . . . With Poor Deer, Oshetsky proves themself the bard of unruly psyches.” — New York Times Book Review
“[A] magnetic, fable-like novel. . . . Oshetsky structures parts of Poor Deer in the present, perhaps to show how guilt and grief can shape a person and inform their decisions . . . [Their] deeply perceptive treatment of Margaret’s emotionally impoverished childhood and warped psyche more than makes up for any plot holes or light sketching.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“[Oshetsky] renders the four-year-old Margaret’s inner life with sensitive complexity, depicting an alert child logic that defies adults’ view of her as slow and unfeeling.” — New Yorker
"Oshetsky handles Margaret’s monstrous manifestation with a delicate touch and infuses her daily life with a muted eeriness. . . . Readers will be captivated by Margaret’s beautifully weird search for atonement." — Publisher's Weekly
“If there is such a thing as a sophomore slump, Oshetsky has deftly sidestepped it, producing a tale that both enchants and perplexes . . . Oshetsky deftly pulls aside the curtain to show us Margaret’s struggle to reconcile her emotional, subjective history with the persistent, objective one that keeps intruding on her psyche. Ultimately, even if the details are somewhat suspect, emotional honesty may earn Margaret the right to the forgiveness she so desperately craves, and convince Poor Deer to trot back into the subconscious forest from which she sprang.” — Bookpage
“Oshetsky adds a hint of the supernatural to this exploration of destiny, unrequited affection, and the transformative power of guilt. They are especially skilled at outlining the tension between Margaret’s deeply complex inner life and her quiet, often taciturn exterior. This haunting and evocative novel will resonate with readers of Richard Russo, Lionel Shriver, and Markus Zusak.” — Booklist
MARCH 2024 - AudioFile
There's a strange fable-like quality to this novel about grief and the stories children tell to make sense of it. Sophie Amoss brings all that into her performance by varying her tone and pacing, and shifting her voice as the story moves between time periods. As a girl, Margaret loses her best friend in a tragic accident. Her role in the death is murky, and as she grows older, her memory of events takes on a life of its own. She's haunted by a strange creature named Poor Deer, whom Amoss voices in a low, disturbing rasp. She creates further tension in her portrayal of secondary characters, including Margaret's mother and aunt. This is a complex audiobook with plenty of rewards for patient listeners. L.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-09-22
A terrible mistake burdens an isolated child with a bossy, hot-breathed conscience/companion.
Oshetsky follows a well-received debut, Chouette (2021), with another odd, child-driven, animal-haunted narrative, this time the dark fairy tale of Margaret Murphy, who, as a 4-year-old, is implicated in the death of her friend Agnes Bickford. "Poor Deer" is the phrase Margaret overhears—and misspells—as her widowed mother, Florence, and Aunt Dolly sympathize over the suffering Agnes’ mother, Ruby, must be enduring at the loss. But for sensitive Margaret, the term converts into an actual hooved, yellow-teethed, articulate presence, the externalization of all her childish feelings and unanswered questions about Ruby, Agnes, and herself: the guilt, grief, sin, and sorrow. “Her hooves kick out at my shins. She nips and hurts…She demands justice. She never forgives.” The story opens as 16-year-old Margaret begins writing—at Poor Deer’s insistence—her confession, looking back to her younger self. On the fateful day of Agnes’ death, the two girls had played in the mud of a flooded school yard, then in a toolshed. As part of a game, Agnes had climbed into a disused cooler from which Margaret couldn’t release her, leaving Ruby to find the body and Florence to lie about her daughter’s whereabouts. The resulting backwash of blame and pent-up emotion is intensified by the Murphys’ Catholicism. As Margaret loses an infected finger to amputation, so the book’s overt symbolism and spiritual references come to the fore: heaven and the devil; the mark of Cain; ritual and self-harm. Oshetsky delivers this sad, child’s-eye-perspective morality tale in desultory fashion, leavened by a whimsical, occasionally comic tone, leading to a see-saw effect. Redemption, ultimately, is not ruled out.
A fanciful parable of coming to terms with psychological damage inflicted on a child’s psyche.
