I…really hated this book. For as short as it was, it just felt like it went on forever. To be fair, I suppose I should have done just a little more research on it besides reading that a mother thinks she’s turning into a dog. But with a title like Nightbitch, I figured Rachel Yoder was going to give me a fun ride.
With that kind of description, I thought this was going to be a fun sci-fi film, or something more along the lines of a psychological thriller. Neither of those things was really the case. Instead, it was a story of a mother dealing with how drastically her life has changed with motherhood. It’s not even like we are meeting this woman at the start of motherhood. Instead, she has come to her wits end with a toddler, which makes sense, too, but I was unimpressed.
The mother has essentially given up her career and life in order to be her son’s full-time caregiver. This is something I know is relatable to a ton of mothers out there. She feels as though her life has nothing left of what she used to be, her husband kind of slacks off when he’s home, and she’s just always exhausted. It’s during this time that she notices small changes that leads her to believe she is turning into a dog. Not a wolf, but a dog. More specifically, she calls herself Nightbitch when her anger one night is practically untethered.
At this point, I thought maybe she was losing her mind or she was eventually going to be turned into a wolf. I also thought we’d get some kind of interesting backstory as to why she’d be turning into this wolf, but no. Instead, she does eventually turn into a dog for a night where she can tap into her more primal instincts without thinking about the stress and mundanity of her life. Okay. She does this several times over with the most distressing (and personally disturbing) thing happening is that she kills the family cat. It’s just this same cycle over and over for almost 300 pages…pass.
I’m sure this novel resonates to mothers, but it just did not hit the mark with me. I checked it out because it’s getting adapted into a film starring Amy Adams, and that was really intriguing, but ultimately I can’t imagine I’ll be watching this film when it comes out. Read at your own risk.