Chouette audiobook

NOW AVAILABLE!!!even though i had already read and enjoyed The Book of Dog, a novel by the same-brain/different nom de plume as this one, i had my doubts going inthat cover 👍 but it's about birds 👎 and it's about motherhood 👎*but it's about a human mother who gives birth to an owl baby 👍and it opens with a quote from Eraserhead 👍i figured i would read this and it would be fine but not really my kind of thing and i would write a carefully-phrased and polite review and that would be that.but nooooo, i had to go and genuinely enjoy this book for its unsentimental tone, its magical realism style, the musicality of its language (including a few word-strangers i had to look up), and the goddamn ease of its storytelling. it's just...lovely. i mean, it isn't hearts and flowers lovely; the book is riddled with dark predatory scenes, but it's not horror, it's just...nature. it is indeed about a woman named tiny who gives birth to an owl-baby called chouette, and you're welcome to read it as a metaphor of the challenges of raising a special-needs child against the callousness of the world and paternal disgust, but for me, it's wayyy more fun to take it at face value—a child born to hunt, whose tantrums are not like all the other little girls', a wild creature from whom a mother cannot expect to receive any recognizable signs of affection, who cannot communicate their needs as a human baby ("dog-baby") does, whose inner life will always be a complete mystery.ain't no What to Expect When You're Expecting an Owl-Baby to prepare anyone for this.Parents underestimate what owl-babies can do, and I realize I've been guilty of making the same mistake myself. I've been listening too much to your father, who is preoccupied by the way you keep missing typical dog-baby developmental targets, like sits alone without support, when you don't even bend in the middle, or displays social smile, when your mouth is as hard as a beak, or uses spoon to feed self, when you rip and tear and gorge on food without need of a spoon.Nowhere in the developmental targets have I ever read: feeds self by killing small domesticated animals.I'd like to see your dog-cousins try that.motherhood is a life-changing experience, but even more so here, where tiny has to adjust her thinking towards the specific needs of an owl-baby, becoming attuned to her daughter's primal nature, and adapting the typical parenting advice to nurture the traits that will allow chouette to thrive.and, yes, it does draw from that conventional narrative well where a mother's fierce protective love for her child manifests in heroic deeds, activating that maternal impulse to "fight, kill, or die" for their child's well-being. but it also manifests in creative problem-solving; purchasing and freezing large quantities of pinkie mice and releasing live snakes in the living room so that chouette can earn the "prey" in her "bird of prey" status, their home turning gradually into a vibrant ecosystem designed to stimulate and develop her daughter's natural skills, recognizing that imposing her own value system on chouette would do her a great disservice:Today you hunted down a juvenile pocket gopher in the backyard. Your timing was off. At first you only injured it. Its little back legs were broken. It tried to drag itself along toward the safety of a nearby gopher hole, by clutching at the dirt and blades of grass with its front paws and pulling itself along. You hopped along after it, deliriously happy, pecking at its middle parts, until its guts were spilling out. The small thing kept on trying to endure, and to make it to the safety of the gopher hole. You had no qualms about causing another living creature to suffer. I didn't interfere—that would teach you the wrong lesson—but I was wrenched by the experience, and shaken by your lack of compassion. I needed to remind myself many times that owls are not social creatures. You're a born predator. I need to repress my intermittent dog-thinking, and to remind myself that, to be the best owl-baby you can be, you don't need to learn compassion. You need to learn ruthless, solitary strength.But it was all I could do to not go over there and put the little thing out of its misery.it's brutal and beautiful and brilliant and i loved it.i also loved the author's the author's open thank you letter to goodreaders in her review-space for this book (👍 👍 👍), particularly the part where she says:Because you told me I must read Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin and The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin, I learned that I love books about fantastic things, told matter-of-factly.that's exactly what she has achieved with Chouette, and apparently i love those things, too.* i'm not against motherhood themes per se, but novels that announce themselves as being celebrations of motherhood are generally variations of the same emotion-by-numbers story around glad sacrifices and quiet ennobled suffering with occasional moments of joy or pride and it's all very trite and familiar and dull. if i'm gonna read a novel self-identifying as a 'meditation on motherhood,' there better be something fresh brought to the mix, like—oh, i don't know—make the baby an owl or something.come to my blog!

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday." -Khalil GibranThe owl-baby was a product of a mixed mating from an interlude with an owl-lover. Tiny, the birth mother, mourned for her past life as a professional cellist. Life as a musician would be placed on hold. Her owl-baby Chouette would be "in charge" for the foreseeable future. Despite Tiny's owl-lover's plea for her to return to the gloaming where she spent part of her childhood, a place where she was truly loved, Tiny chose to stay with her husband.Raising owl-baby Chouette was a harrowing experience. "...surrounded by [a] bright, bold gaggle of birds, I'm overcome with the beauty of the wild world and I weep a little to think that the owl-baby chose me...I begin to understand what a gift I've been given...The truth overwhelms me, and humbles me. The birds are telling me that my life's work, as your mother, will be to teach you how to be yourself- and to honor however much of the wild world you have in you...rather than mold you to be what I want you to be, or what your father wants you to be." My husband wanted to inhabit "a world of dependable right angles." He wanted conformity. As an avoidance technique, he worked long hours in order to be absent from home as much as possible. Tiny needed to embrace unusual and different techniques to care for her three pound owl-baby girl. These included baths using a stockpot as a bathtub and providing a diet of "pinkie mice" to feed Chouette's animalistic appetite.Tiny worked around the clock to learn the body rhythms of her newborn daughter. No friends or family visited, horrified by Chouette's uniqueness. Chouette was excluded from family gatherings. For a while, music was succor to mother and child. Tiny played the cello with Chouette's dissonant accompaniment on the marimba.Owl-baby "will never learn to speak...never learn to read...the father can see no single thing in this child that reminds him of himself. He seeks a remedy...a fix created by medical science. Chouette is "wild...violent. She doesn't have a nose. People are afraid of her. No one visits us any longer." He is on a mission, a crusade to change Chouette into a socially acceptable little girl. Tiny fights him tooth and nail. She wants to help her owl-baby embrace her individuality.Motherhood changes everything. It is no longer about you. Children must come first as demonstrated by Tiny's quest to be a classical cellist a dream, now placed on the back burner. Motherhood's exciting, frightening, sleepless journey was magnified by trials and missteps, trying to find the right balance when raising a child with special needs. Tiny often felt physically and emotionally abandoned by a husband who exerted constant pressure on her to authorize his attempts to find a miracle treatment to normalize Chouette's behavior so she would take her place in conventional society. Eventually, Chouette would spread her wings and fly."Chouette" by Claire Oshetsky is a timeless study of the fierceness of "mother love" to protect one's children. Mistakes will be made. Decisions might continue to be at odds with one's partner. Irregardless, the time will come when children, both human and animal, will leave home and strike out on their own, listening to the beat of their own drum. Author Claire Oshetsky, a gifted writer, presents a journey into motherhood infused with music, emotion, longing and regrets. The cover art enhances this beautiful, heartfelt tome.Thank you Claire Oshetsky and Ecco/HarperCollins Publishing for the physical ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"Chouette" by Claire Oshetsky is an oddly compelling read!What the heck did I just read? Wow! This story is over-the-top! So why couldn't I put it down? Why do I keep thinking about it?Could it be the beautiful writing or the intermittent humor that makes me smile and laugh unexpectedly? Or, is it the creativeness of the story, referring to a non-conforming child as an owl-baby and everyone else as dog-people? Is it the resilience of this mother and child relationship through their journey together? Or, is it the father's obsession as his mission to fix Chouette becomes scary?Chouette is born demanding, wild, violent and strange. Her mother, wants her to be her true self. Her father desperately wants to find a cure for her.A story that's a bit different, it holds me, then it captures me! It's a story that makes my brain bop around in my head like a pinball machine! Yep! It's that crazy!For most, this may seem like a strange and dark read. What it is though is a beautifully written and unique story about being different than the expected norm. It's about how a mother's love for her child sustains her. How her selflessness and unwavering commitment to her daughter's well-being keeps her whole and completes her. This novel is a brilliant piece of fiction that I highly recommend to all who enjoy quirky, different reads. Ones that make you think and continue to long after you're finished. Think so hard that your head feels like it might blow-off and your eyeballs might pop-out. That's exactly how I feel and I simply love this story!All the stars!Thank you to NetGalley, Ecco, and Claire Oshetsky for a free ARC of this book. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review. This book is available now.

“Chouette”, ...... by Claire Oshetsky ......is a monumental tawny tiny hooting feat — daring and remarkable —exceptionally creative, original, and affecting.,It’s one of the most intimate novels I’ve read all year.....cutting deep into the core of motherhood.Claire turns the implausible into entirely believable fiction ....while gracefully sticking pin cushions into our global-mothering hearts.Tiny is a professional musician, a cellist. Her husband is a property lawyer in the patented-seed field. They live in Sacramento CaliforniaAll sounds normal enough.....right? Perhaps...perhaps not. But what’s normal anyway? “My husband has just stopped reading the news on his phone because just now I got the words out past my lips that I’ve been wanting to say to him all morning, which are”:“Help me”. “There it’s done. I’ve said it. The word rights itself”. “He reaches across the table and grabs my hand”. “What is it? He says. What’s on your mind? I love you. I’m here to help”. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all, I say. This baby is an owl-baby”. “Oh honey, honey, honey, my husband says. That’s the jitters talking. Don’t listen. I’m here for you. I love you”. She and her husband play gin rummy after dinner together. She tells her husband: “It’s an owl-baby. “Honey, my husband says. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t revisit the past. You’re stronger than you know”. “I dream I am making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lovers embrace. Two weeks later I learned that I am pregnant”. “You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between women and owl?” “I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman”. “An owl-baby is born. The baby will never learn to speak, or love, or look after itself. It will never learn to read or toss the football. The father can see no single thing in this child that reminds him of himself. He thinks: ‘This isn’t fair to me’. And then he leaves. The mother stays”. The owl-baby bite my tongue”. This book is so darn remarkable, — ENGAGING—- I can’t believe how much I enjoyed the oddness —that in many ways —just ‘didn’t’ feel that odd to me at all. Perhaps, I’m the crazy one .... but this story felt more raw & real to me than many memoirs. The storytelling provided the truest satisfactions of reading. .....We learn about Tiny’s husband - 6 feet tall; the shortest of his six sibling brothers. .....We learn about Tiny’s in-laws and her husbands brother - and their wives. .....We learn about Tiny as a child - her father, mother, the town she grew up in, a painful memoir day at the zoo....wrenching - sad - untrue, and unfair cruel abusive messages she took in from both her own family growing up and from the way her mother-in-law made her feel [an outlier, tiny, fragile, unwanted, just not good enough]. .....Once Tiny was pregnant, struggling with many concerns ... she felt as though she was getting a message from her ‘owl-baby’.....letting Tiny know that ‘she’ was in charge from now on. Tiny wondered, really wondered, was this what it means to be a mother: “to be in constant, irrational conflict with one’s on child?” .....Tiny played some Mozart music for her unborn owl-baby-asking if she liked it .....”referring to her as a little scamp”.Soon...mother and owl-baby were no longer at odds-and she continued playing her music. There is a trip to Berlin museum visits, cafés, and walks along the streets. Tiny runs into her owl-lover, a woman that she was once very close. She tells her she is pregnant. Tiny also realizes she made the right choice to stay with her husband, “who is kind, strong, steady, normal, even good looking”.....“whereas her owl-lover is a giant, musky, molting, monstrous, amoral, uncivilized, and fickle”....a creature Tiny once loved.There was a smelling problem....(I found this a little funny)There were concert problems... And most...Tiny had to think seriously about the gift she had been given —chosen—to be a mother. The responsibility was overwhelming and humbling. Tiny was picking up messages from birds telling her that her life‘s work was to teach her baby how to be herself—rather than mold her to be what she or the father wanted to be.Owl-baby....a girl....*Chouette* was born. .....Tiny made lists of things she was learning about Chouette ....Music was a shared love between them.... .....Tiny told Chouette stories about her childhood. She told her that she used to live with the ‘Bird of the Wood’....that she had shared a room together in a little woodland house....thought she would marry her owl-lover one day. .....They rocked together....mother and Chouette were working it out.But/and....motherhood is intense....so much can breakdown.I wondered how Chouette was developing- and if Tiny was able to give her baby ‘enough’ of what she needed....(given her own background)....I was proud of Tiny. I felt that given where she came from she couldn’t have asked anymore of herself....I found the ending incredibly moving > Loving-Tears- good!!!!There are horrors I haven’t mentioned along the way ...but they were necessary and damn thought provoking. This story opens up the can of worms of just how frightening it is to enter the mysteries of mothering....but it’s vitally important to examine.The symbolism that Claire created raised questions about the brutal realities of life! The metaphors, the prose, the emotions, the smells, and visuals, the memorable - unique gorgeous usage of words in her sentences....I just can’t say enough about how unforgettable and magnificent this book is! I’d love to see book clubs choosing this book to talk about. I’d like to be in one of those groups- and would gladly read this book again to join the discussion. ABOUT OWLS....(spiritually speaking):Owls represent wisdom, knowledge, change, transformation, intuitive development, and trusting the mystery. They are tied to the spiritual symbolism of death, which brings about new beginnings with a higher understanding and evolved perspective. Owls can show up when you were being asked to listen to your intuition. Claire Oshetsky was very effective in delivering an interactive-experience between her characters, motherhood, and the readers. “Chouette” is one of BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN MY HUMBLE OPINION!

This is quite a tale from the wonderful Claire Oshetsky. Chouette explores motherhood, ableism, enforced conformity, and other themes in a remarkably fresh way. There is plenty of dark humor, which makes Chouette a delightful read despite the issues it grapples with. Dog-people may not get it, but for the rest of us this is revelatory. Thanks to Ecco Books for a paperback ARC.

Shortlistec for the Barbellion Prize. My life becomes a row of tiny memory-pearls, strung along a limpid string. Typically, you sleep until noon. When you’re awake, I change your diaper and feed you a meal of chopped pinkie mice mixed with raw egg. After breakfast you burp up a neat pellet like clockwork. And then, in the afternoon, we’ll play music together. I’ve decided to call the sounds we make together “music.” I play my cello, and you run and peck at your little marimba. I’m never sure whether the sounds you make are intentional or whether they are accidental improvisations—a kind of found art. Either way, my days have become tolerable. It’s true that if I try to play any music on my own— music I might want to play, independent of your wishes— then you’ll fly at me and peck at my fingers and slash at the fingerboard. .... I’ve learned it’s best to follow your lead and to adapt to your tunings. A novel by one of the most insightful reviewers of literary fiction on Goodreads (where she uses the review name Lark Benobi) – one which I think will appeal to fans of Rachel Yoder's “Night Bitch” a book I think it resembles with its intense, visceral exploration of motherhood via the medium both of animal-transformation and with a very deliberate “tightrope” walk of the fantastic between whether the book’s central premise is parable, fantast, metaphor or reality.The book opens with the narrator (Tiny – a concert cellist) recounting a vivid dream of making love with a female owl – finding out two weeks later that she is pregnant. Her all-American patent-lawyer husband (one of a family of six wholesome brothers with wholesome and conventional “dog-baby” children – one of the wives “the secret abortionist” being the only real outsider other than Tiny) is delighted – but Tiny immediately insists that the baby will be an owl-baby – his attitude to that running the range of pity to embarrassment to anger at his wife bringing up past issues and projecting them on to their baby.But when the baby is born, after a interim trip to Berlin which I have to say did not quite resonate with me, the Doctor’s immediate diagnosis is that the observations at birth (Tufted head, Yellow Eyes, Chitinous scaling) are “consistent with Strigiformes”.Tiny names her owl-baby Chouette and fiercely resists conventional developmental milestones, standard baby raring and medical intervention – instead letting herself be led by instinct and by Chouette’s developing needs. Her husband – furious at her refusal to give the baby he calls Charlotte a chance at a normal life - takes the opposite view (But here’s the crux of it, owl-baby. Your father wants to fix you, and I want us to love you as you are): seeking help and assistance from schools and doctors. Tiny’s only real ally is her sister-in-law who briefly becomes her lover before being herself unable to accept the reality of Chouette.From their we have a story of motherhood and I think particularly how as a mother one navigates and breaks free of societal expectations and pre-formed moulds to allow one’s children to grow and develop into their own identities with all the sacrifice of one’s own expectations and pre-conceptions that involves as well as the pain of allowing them to eventually break free of parental influence as well as societal.This is not a book that will I think appeal to everyone – those looking for a conventional narrative may struggle and for all its celebration of avian life I think some readers will find the deaths of various animals (mainly pets) triggering. None of this applied to me – although I will confess that, perhaps appropriately given my avatar, I did realise that my own sympathies and even parenting styles were much closer to that of the parents of dog-babies. I was also initially slightly uncomfortable at the scenes set in a church (although these were treated more sympathetically than I feared). I did find that the copious and clearly deeply understood musical references (which are then compiled in an afterword) were almost entirely wasted on me.But ultimately of course great literature is often about exploring differences and gaining an empathetic understanding of ideas, views and experiences different to one’s own - and this very striking novel does this brilliantly.My thanks to Little Brown Book Group UK for an ARC via NetGalley

A strange, fantastic, and dizzyingly intelligent book that offers a unique perspective on motherhood in particular and parenthood in general. I loved every page.

To say this is a “different” read is an understatement.Some may love this, some may hate it.When I started this I was thinking WTF?, an owl baby??!!!Ultimately, this is a parable.. about a mother’s love for her child.This owl baby was born and the mother went to any length to care for her.. no matter what obstacles came about and no matter what her husband, in-laws, or the general population thought was best for the child.It’s different alright… sometimes horrific, sometimes funny, sometimes unbelievable, but I enjoyed it!(Since the mother was a cellist, there are many classical music references mentioned in the story that I just must look up and listen to.)Oh….and this cover is gorgeous!Thank you to Netgalley and Ecco for the ARC!

A bizarre, dark and strangely elegant story about a woman who gives birth to an owl. Sort of. Honestly, I can't even explain it but I could not put it down.

Longlisted for one of the UK’s most important prizes, the Barbellion PrizeBut here’s the crux of it, owl-baby. Your father wants to fix you, and I want us to love you as you are.Chouette, by Claire Oshetsky is a fiercely empathetic, powerful and beautifully written parable of motherhood, published by Virago in the UK and Ecco in the US and due out in November 2021. It opens:I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant. You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman. As for you, owl-baby, let’s lay out the facts. Your owlness is with you from the very beginning. It’s there when a first cell becomes two, four, eight. It’s there when you sleep too much, and crawl too late, and when you bite when you aren’t supposed to bite, and shriek when you aren’t supposed to shriek; and on the day that you are born—on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box—I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become. But there you will be, and you will be of me.Our narrator Tiny senses immediately that her embryonic child is different, as she tells her husband:“Help me.” There, it’s done. I’ve said it. He reaches across the table and grabs my hands.“What is it?” he says. “What’s on your mind? I love you. I’m here to help.”“You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” I say. “This baby is an owl-baby.”Her husband dismisses her fears as early-pregnancy jitters, but as the baby is born she is indeed different to the “dog-babies” her inlaws had come to expect.Tiny, is a cellist, and music plays a key background role in the novel. The author has provided a Spotify playlist of the pieces features, which I found added to the novel’s already captivating atmosphere, an example being this which inspires the baby’s name.And then I hear a soft aria singing in my head, that one from Massenet’s unbearably tragic opera Werther—“Va! laisse couler mes larmes!”—and tears fall inside of me, hammering my heart, until my baby’s true name is revealed. “Her name is Chouette,” I say.Tiny and her husband take, as the opening quote to my review suggests, different paths to Chouette’s development, with Tiny’s husband anxiously monitoring missed developmental milestones, seeking medical treatment and even calling the baby Charlotte, while Tiny comes to her own realisation that Chouette has special skills of her own:Parents underestimate what owl-babies can do, and I realize I’ve been guilty of making the same mistake myself. I’ve been listening too much to your father, who is preoccupied by the way you keep missing typical dog-baby developmental targets, like sits alone without support, when you don’t even bend in the middle, or displays social smile, when your mouth is as hard as a beak, or uses spoon to feed self, when you rip and tear and gorge on food without need of a spoon. Nowhere in the developmental targets have I ever read: feeds self by killing small domesticated animals. I’d like to see your dog-cousins try that.Although as her life becomes increasingly dominated by Chouette, her musical career in literal ruins, anxiously covering over the fact that the aforementioned small domesticated animal was the neighbour’s kids’ escaped gerbil, her husband argues that she is the neglectful one:You give up on everything, don’t you?” he says. “Isn’t it just like you, to give up on your music, too? The way you gave up on me? The way you gave up on our girl?”I could tell him that my cello lies in broken pieces behind the locked door of my home studio, and that wharf rats have stolen away the strings, and that my fingers are like sticks, and my arms are weak with pits and scars. I could tell him that my thoughts are out of tune, and that the idea of music feels like an old forgotten memory in a drawer because my girl takes up every breath and every moment of my life. But I know he’s asking me a different question altogether. He doesn’t care about my music. He never has. He stopped coming to concerts once we married, as if attending them to begin with was always just part of a courtship ritual that was no longer required of him.The novel also contains flashbacks to Tiny’s own adolescence and a traumatic event, with echoes of the closing section of The Vegetarian (see below) which led to her first encounter with her owl-lover:My mother didn’t answer. She gestured mutely toward her feet. Is it true that her long toes were burying themselves in the ground, so deeply that she could no longer take a step? Do I honestly remember seeing her two feet rooting themselves to the spot? Did her skin really become hard and rough all over, like a tree? Were there really spring-green leaves spilling forth from her fingertips? Or has my adult mind painted the memory of this night in such unlikely colors, as a way to assuage my guilt for leaving her? I could hear men shouting and dogs barking, coming closer. Ahead I could see the tangled thicket. The wind in the trees sounded like the voices of women singing in chorus, and their voices were filled with glottal embellishments, as if sung by throats made of wood. The music urged me forward. And so I left my mother, and went on without her. I wasn’t afraid, because the trees took care of me, and they brooded and bent over me, and sang to me their melancholy songs, and fed me, and gave me succor, until the Bird of the Wood found me and took me home with her and taught me to trust to the sound of my own voice.The author is one of those (all too few) also highly active on Goodreads as a reviewer and participant in discussion groups, under the username ‘Lark Benobi’, and on her reviewer (as opposed to author) page she lists some of her favourite novels of recent years: The Vegetarian by Han Kang tr. Deborah Smith, Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz tr. Sarah Moses & Carolina Orloff, Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin tr. Megan McDowell, Earthlings by Sayaka Murata tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Sealed by Naomi Booth, Real Life by Adeline Dieudonné re. Roland Glasser and Ladivine by Marie N'Daiye tr. Jordan Stump (links to the author’s reviews).That list has considerable overlap with my own reading, and it is a pleasure to read an anglosphere author in such active dialogue with world literature, although Chouette is a unique work of its own.I have often cited (including when reviewing Fever Dream) the literary critic Todorov who referred to what he calls the fantastic, arguing that an author can choose between a rational explanation for supernatural events - what Todorov calls "the uncanny" - and a supernatural explanation - what he calls the "marvellous" (and most would call fantasy). The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. This is a delicate literary tightrope and most novels fail to balance along it for their entire path, but Chouette does so, leaving it for the reader to determine, or indeed to also choose to leave undecided, whether Chouette is a literal owl-baby, or whether the owl-baby condition is a form of developmental or genetic condition. And Oshetsky uses the “duration of this uncertainty” to explore motherhood in a unique way but also marriage and the impact of parenthood, relationships with extended families particularly in-laws and, above all, how we, both individually as parents and collectively as a society, treat those who are different to our norms.Highly recommended and surely a strong Woman’s Prize contender.Thanks to Virago via Netgalley for the ARC.