SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING AMY ADAMS • In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. • "A must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." —Vulture One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else... An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms. As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem. An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.

No one thought Nightbitch was terrible or amateurish. The position of the central character, a mother who is a doting parent but at the same time stymied and enraged by the limits on her life as a mother, was compelling to us, and her choice to dive into an animalistic version of pure motherhood was a fascinating premise. The way Yoder allowed anger to be expressed in maternal love was particularly disturbing and interesting, and so many scenes around the main character's emotions -- her ruthless attack of the cat, her humiliation in front of her art friends, her awkwardness around the moms in her community -- fell both original and true. The issue with the book came at the end. The novel ties up with a solution ('make it art') that just didn't work for most of NUBClub. The piece the protagonist creates is not very interesting as art, and the whole idea that art could be redemptive in this story felt a bit easy. For some of us, the ending was a dealbreaker, and it undermined the power of the rest of the novel. For others, while the ending did fall flat, the rest of the novel showed enough daring and intriguing magically-real ambivalence that it was a forgivable dip. That said, there were many good components, not the least of which the running sub-thread of research into different kinds of shapeshifting women, that everyone defended, even the most betrayed by the finale. Our closing opinion is that at least the first half of the novel is quite good, so it's probably worth your read if bizarre and unresolved tales of the complexities of motherhood sound interesting to you. We can't guarantee you'll like it given how it ends, but know that at least half of us would recommend it.