Book: “Some Kind of Animal” by Maria Romasco Moore
Publishing Info: Delacorte Press, August 2020
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.
Book Description: A story about two girls guarding a secret no one would ever believe and the desperate lengths they will go to in order to protect each other from the outside world.
Jo lives in the same town where her mother disappeared fifteen years ago. Everyone knows what happened to Jo’s mom. Now people are starting to talk about Jo. She’s barely passing her classes and falls asleep at her desk every day. She’s following in her mom’s footsteps. Jo has a secret — she has a twin sister. Her sister is not like most people. She lives in the woods, wild and free. Night after night, as often as she can manage, Jo slips out of her bedroom window and meets her sister in the woods, where together they run, fearlessly.
When Jo’s twin attacks a boy from town, the people in town assume it must have been Jo. Now Jo has to decide whether to tell the world about her sister or to run. SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is an accessible, feminist thriller that digs into themes of sisterhood, family, and friendship.
Review: Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!
My bachelor’s degree is in Psychology, and one of the most interesting topics from one of my classes was the story of Victor of Aveyron, aka the Wild Boy of Aveyron. In the late 1700s in France a feral twelve year old boy was found roaming the countryside. He was eventually taken into society and studied, and various people attempted to acclimate him to the human world. While he never fully acclimated, there was some progress while he was in the care of a medical student named Jean Marc Gaspard Itard. Feral children have been seen in history and in literature, and “Some Kind of Animal” by Maria Romasco Moore brings that theme to a YA thriller. The feral child plot point is what drew me in initially, I think, though I had theories that this story couldn’t possibly actually be dealing with a feral child, because it seemed like it would be difficult to pull off in the setting that it was functioning in. And yet.
I went into “Some Kind of Monster” believing that our main character Jo didn’t actually have a twin sister named Lee who was living in the wilderness outside her small town. Given Jo’s traumatic childhood, after her mother disappeared and was possibly murdered, and growing up with a harried aunt and a toxic grandmother, as well as being unable to shake the reputation her mother had, I thought it would be a manifestation of her trauma. But I can tell you right now that no, there is absolutely a feral twin living in the woods, and reader, I just don’t think that I quite believed it. Don’t get me wrong, the groundwork is kind of laid to show how Lee ended up there, and how she stayed and survived out there without anyone knowing about her existence outside of Jo. Explanations are given, but I’m still not totally certain that I buy them. I also don’t quite buy Jo not telling anyone who MIGHT listen to her about her twin. Grandma Margaret, sure, that woman is awful and her reaction to what she perceives as a lie definitely tracks, therein making Jo’s reluctance to insist upon Lee’s existence completely believable. But not telling her Aunt Aggie? Not telling her best friend Savannah? I can’t suspend my disbelief that hard. On top of that, there are a lot of twists and reveals that happen once the action in this book gets going, but once they are revealed a fair number of them don’t have much pay off. There is a rather big one regarding a character’s paternity that I thought would have a lot of reverberations, but it’s barely touched upon for the rest of the book, at least in a way that might bring some insight into both characters. It just felt rushed. And the ending? VERY rushed.
Along with a hard to believe and hasty plot, most of the characters weren’t very interesting or multifaceted. Again, I thought that this book was going to be an exploration of Jo’s traumatic childhood, but while it’s acknowledged it was a hard time and that she has trouble trusting people, it’s a whole lot of telling and not much showing. Lee, too, is relegated to feral girl role, and she just isn’t terribly interesting outside of ‘so is she going to attack someone again?’ I will say, however, that there was one character who didn’t feel two dimensional or incomplete, and that is the character of Jo’s Aunt Aggie. There was a very quiet sadness about Aggie, who has been raising Jo as best she can while also mourning the loss of her little sister, and trying to keep Jo away from Aggie’s toxic mother Margaret. I thought that Aggie was the most compelling character because she is very obviously in over her head when it comes to being the guardian to her neice, and doesn’t make the wisest decisions when it comes to her own life and choices (shacking up with the new pastor in town when she herself has turned her back on God seems like maybe not the BEST idea, especially since the pastor is clearly trying to save himself by saving others). She really reminded me of Parker Posey’s character Libby Mae in “Waiting for Guffman”, if Libby Mae was a bit more beaten down by life.
I was quite disappointed that “Some Kind of Animal” didn’t gel for me. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t gel for you! I could definitely see myself recommending it to the right person. After all…
Rating 4: A promising idea falls short. Improbable plot points and two dimensional characters really dragged this story down.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Some Kind of Animal” is included on the Goodreads list “2020 YA Mysteries and Thrillers”.
Find “Some Kind of Animal” at your library using WorldCat, or a local independent bookstore using IndieBound!
The Library Ladies 