Claire Oshetsky lives with her family in California. Chouette draws on her own experiences as the mother to non-conforming children.
Claire Oshetsky's novel is a marvel: its language a joy, its
imagination dizzying. Every time I thought I had cracked Chouette's
central metaphor - aha, it's about motherhood! No, marriage! No,
music! - the book flew out my grasp like a wary bird. It's a truly
exhilarating read.
*Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind*
Searing and ethereal . . . In fiction, supernatural premises are
notoriously hard to land, but Chouette's final moments are among
its loveliest. Human and owl meet in equal measure on the page in a
crescendo of stunning lines. Just as Tiny longs for the world to
meet her daughter where she is instead of forcing her into societal
norms, Chouette is best met where it resides: as a harrowing and
magnificent fable.
*New York Times*
Frighteningly elegant, darkly funny, horrifyingly tender . . . Like
all the best fables, Chouette locates a current of human darkness
pulsing just below its surface. . . Oshetsky has produced a
troubling triumph that is brave enough to leave its biggest
questions unanswered.
*iNews*
Oshetsky describes the novel as being inspired by her experience of
raising "non-conforming children", and is herself autistic. Her
depiction of a baby who misses its developmental milestones,
doesn't speak and lashes out when frightened will be familiar to
some families with experience of disability or neurodiversity.
Chouette is a sublime parable of mother-love which ferociously
eviscerates society's failure to accept nonconformity . . . It
would not surprise me if Chouette finds a place in the feminist
literary canon. It has lingered in my mind in a way that only the
most original works do.
*Guardian*
This wildly imagined debut presents a parable of maternal love
unlike any other you'll have encountered . . . Dark wit,
tenderness, music, enchantment - they're all part of a story that
remains oddly relatable despite its dazzling strangeness.
*Observer*
Viscous, tender, baffling, and glorious, Chouette is an
unforgettable fairy tale that glitters darkly with Oshetsky's raw
and soaring brilliance. Part love letter, part lament, Chouette
astonishes as each perfected sentence burrows deep into the
maternal shadows of love, possession, selfhood, and sanity. A
bone-deep, breathtaking wonder.
*Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch*
Chouette is a hypnotic read that captures the strangeness and
ferocity of motherhood - poetic, dark and striking.
*Catherine Cho, author of Inferno*
Chouette is deeply felt, linguistically gorgeous, and wonderfully
disorienting up to its final breathless pages-a stunning meditation
on motherhood and identity truly unlike anything I've ever read
before.
*Claire Lombardo, bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever
Had*
An intensely strange and moving novel, Chouette is unlike anything
else. It renders maternal love with mythological ferocity. Weird
and darkly witty, Chouette kept drawing me deeper into its wild and
dangerous territories.
*Naomi Booth, author of Sealed*
From the dark woods of motherhood, Chouette swoops - fierce, feral,
poetic and deft. From an extraordinary beginning to its ecstatic
end, I was gripped and held by this beautiful and deeply strange
fable. A singular and inventive book about maternal instinct and
helping the children we are gifted to find their own distinct forms
of flight.
*Liz Berry, poet, author of Black Country and The Republic of
Motherhood*
Written in perfectly balanced prose, Chouette does what the very
best fantastical work does: it renders a vividly absurd picture
which, as we look closer, depicts our reality more sharply than any
realism could do. Exuberant, maddened, and sly, this book gives
more straight-talk about the vagaries of motherhood than a dozen
how-to manuals.
*Brian Evenson, author of Song For the Unraveling of the World*
There are many stories that address the myriad themes of
motherhood, but it would be hard to find one that did it in such an
utterly original way as Chouette. Drawing on her own experiences of
mothering non-conforming children, Oshetsky weaves a contemporary
fable so affecting, yet brimming with humour and life, that you'll
probably tear through it in one sitting.
*Happy Magazine, Australia*
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