Amelia is a make up artist with a difference - all the clients are dead. Working for her mother’s funeral home, she is surround by death and she is comfortable with even, even finding beauty in it. That is, until someone she loves dies unexpectedly and Amelia can’t face it. She runs away on a plane, trying to outrun her grief by dipping her toe into the world of BDSM.

Well, I can safely say I have never read a book like this one. I really enjoyed the first half of the book. Amelia, though not always relatable, is a really interesting and intriguing character. The subject of grief is written in a really delicate, raw and honest way that will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one. However, the last section of the book lost my interest. The things I initially liked about Amelia started to irritate me. It became bizarre and cringy and with a real rushed ending. I am glad I read it, it’s not one I will forget anytime soon, but recommend it? I am not sure.

Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for the advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Like no book I’ve ever read, this throws you right in to Lia’s disfunctional way of dealing with her grief but makes no apologies, allowing that everyone deals with their emotions different. Sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes heart breaking.

Unfortunately this book wasn’t for me.

The premise was really good but at 25% in I don’t really know what’s happening and I can’t connect with the main character Amelia.

I feel like I’m in a whirlwind and I can’t make our which way is up.

Some parts it feels like it should be comedic and in the next sentence I have deep feelings of melancholy,

DNF for me currently but I may revisit at some point.

New Animal is a bold story that explores the uncontrollable nature of grief.

When Amelia - a make-up artist at a funeral parlour - experiences her own grief we see her completely unravel. As we watch her unravel we see how her grief manifests in the strange. She runs away and delves into the world of BDSM trying to feel pain to make the unbearable emotional pain she is feeling.

Ella Baxter is an exciting new voice. Whilst New Animal didn't hit all my needs for a story it was Ella Baxter's easy writing style that kept me engaged. I'm excited to see what else she can do.

New Animal by is available now.

For more information regarding Ella Baxter (@Ella_Baxter_) please visit her Twitter page.

For more information regarding Pan Macmillan (@panmacmillan) please visit www.panmacmillan.com.

A book about BODIES! I loved Amelia's voice - Ella Baxter has a wonderful way with words, and that's what kept me reading rather than the plot. The mortician stuff was well-researched and I liked that it was a young woman moving through a world you absolutely do not associate with young women! I wasn't sure the scenes about kink culture felt as authentic as the rest of the book.

Amelia is no stranger to sex and death. Her job in her family’s funeral parlour, doing make-up on the dead, might be unusual, but she’s good at it. Life and warmth comes from the men she meets online – combining with someone else’s body at night in order to become something else, at least for a while.

But when a sudden loss severs her ties with someone she loves, Amelia sets off on a seventy-two-hour mission to outrun her grief – skipping out on the funeral, running away to stay with her father in Tasmania and experimenting on the local BDSM scene. There she learns more about sex, death, grief, and the different ways pain works its way through the body.

It takes two fathers, a bruising encounter with a stranger and recognition of her own body’s limits to bring Amelia back to herself.
Gripping!

When I saw New Animals​ on the front page of NetGalley for its UK release, I was intrigued. The cover looked incredible (I mean look at it! Big kudos to the cover designer!) and when I read that the main character worked in a funeral partner, I was morbidly hooked. With the added bonus of the book being about exploring sex and grief, this book was right up my street. New Animal tells the story of losing yourself in grief and in sex, and it also tells the story of finding yourself through those very things once again. While I think this is a great debut, I am hesitant to recommend this book. It is an incredibly difficult book to read, and it is most definitely not for everyone - and, unfortunately, it was nowhere near being the favourite I assumed it would be. I was hoping to be more connected to the protagonist, but unfortunately I found her a bit bland. While I understand that she was making decisions through grief, I also could not help feeling enraged at her for the choices she makes in the book - primarily because she, in her internal dialogue, tends to reflect on how bad of a choice it is to make. I wanted more character development, but the pace of the book was too quick for the character to follow it, and I wish there had been some more reflections on lust, sex, and, perhaps most importantly, grief and death. Nonetheless, New Animal is a completely okay debut, and I will definitely be picking up whatever Baxter releases next, albeit with some hesitation. 3/5 stars​.

I’ll start off by saying that this book was, very much, a visceral experience. There are a lot of very strong moments and images that sometimes made me squirm a little. Much like the content of Animal by Lisa Taddeo, I didn’t think that this uncomfortable feeling was a bad one. It’s like an awkward truth or taboo topic which we explore as the novel goes on.
New Animal follows Amelia as she struggles to come to terms with the death of her mother and how to live with her grief. Amelia is a protagonist with a very strong personality and voice. I couldn’t help but root for her to find what she needed!
To me, this book was very much about bodies and how important they are. It’s easy to get caught up in the mind, as that’s where ‘we’ essentially. Baxter seems to explore our connection with bodies and what they mean for our identities.
The writing in this novel was beautiful with some very profound moments.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this book at first as it was very fast paced and just seemed to be a lot of stuff going on but then it found it’s pace and the story was an interesting look at how and what different people do to deal with grief and trauma. Once I got into it I really enjoyed it and really felt for the characters.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

New Animal. I had high hopes for this book. I wasn't exactly sure what I was getting myself into, but I knew that this was a story that centred around the grief of a young lady as she deals with the death of somebody close to her. Sounds like my bread and butter. I live for sad, weird, uncomfortable stories.

Amelia works for her family's funeral home. She's responsible for the presentation of the dead. She dresses them, does their hair, spends time on their make-up. She's close to her family. One of them dies. What follows is the story of Amelia's departure from her life as she tries to run away from her grief by flying away from it and going to stay with her birth father.

It's a story that isn't for the faint of heart. It doesn't shy away from the weird, the sad, the sexual and the grotesque. So maybe skip this one if that doesn't sound like something you'd be into, or if you're easily offended. I applaud what Baxter has tried to do here. To be entirely fair to the author, I haven't read this story before. It didn't quite remind me of anything else.

It's a quick, easy and punchy read. But something didn't hit the mark for me. I wanted more of something. More grief, maybe? Somehow I felt unattached from the protagonist. I felt as though she wasn't quite as fleshed out as I would have liked her to be, and some of the secondary characters felt a little two dimensional.

I can't say that I disliked this story, but I was glad when it was finished. I'm sure that this will be one for others to rave about but this time, it didn't quite do it for me. All that said and done, it's an interesting debut, and I'd definitely be curious to read what Baxter writes in the future.

Amelia isn't your average makeup artist; she has the honour of working with the dead at her family's mortuary. But for someone so acquainted with death, the loss of a loved one knocks Amelia off kilter. She learns to navigate grief in her own way, with the act of life itself - sex - helping her come to terms with her loss.

I really connected with Baxter's writing and liked how ~complicated~ you could call Amelia and how memorable the other characters' quirks are. I had to cover one of my eyes with a hand in secondhand embarrassment when reading about turning a veteran sub into a 'menstrual clown'. But that's what I love about writing and finding new authors to fawn over - the unexpected paths they lead you down. For a book about loss, I found New Animal to be awkwardly funny and really express how grief distorts our minds and behaviour. Death can really fuse you closer to your loved ones and make you more openly unapologetic about your feelings, cos life is too short not to, as Amelia realises with her two dads who could have got along to begin with. And trying new things, such as BDSM, demonstrates how out of control we can feel in the face of death, our bodies and minds off balance.

I felt a bit emotional reading Amelia's epiphany about our bodies. From beginning with her seeking one night stands to feel like a 'new animal', to ending with the tenderness at the mortuary, realising how much we put our bodies through. It made me feel connected to my own and grateful for just being alive and being able to move my body and take it to wonderful places. For a makeup artist, allowing her deceased clients to portray the life they lived rather than merely looking presentable in their caskets is quite illustrative of this manifesto for living.

While I read this via NetGalley, I've preordered the hardback as I just really adored New Animal, and can't wait for what Baxter's got in store next.

I enjoyed this. Short and punchy. I was a bit apprehensive at the start of the book that the character of Amelia was a little one dimensional but as the book progressed (and I assume as she learnt further how to deal with her feelings and process her mums death) the character became more interesting. I did enjoy the exploration into the world of kink however I did think there was a little bit of negative emphasis placed on it- particularly in the way Amelia keeps referring to her body being ruined, however this could be more in her mind as she does things mindlessly rather than claiming that kink ruined her body. It was good to mention how unregulated the industry is and how there is more need for safe places in the community. My favourite character was probably Jack- the poor aloof estranged dad. I like his literature quotes, the importance of dreams and using the natural world to heal sadness and grief for humans.

Thank you NetGalley and Picador for my copy

Review of New Animal by Ella Baxter
I’ve been very jealous of everyone in the U.K. with the physical version that I completely forgot I had been approved for the ebook through @netgalley via @panmacmillian
Wow what a book. This deals with uncomfortable subject matter such as grief and kink but in a raw way that you can’t turn away from.
This book very much reminded me of My Dark Vanessa, one of my favourites of the year, and I’m looking forward to reading more from this author.
I found the exploration of the relationships really interesting and enjoyed the language, I would’ve changed the spacing in the book as the last half felt rushed. I could’ve easily had an additional hundred pages on Amelia’s exploration of kink and her closing revelations.
Thank you for the arc and I’m looking forward to the book being properly released in the U.K. in February

This is such a fascinating book — a really interesting and unique premise. If I had to be critical, I felt that some of the description, particularly of landscapes and locations, became tedious and overwritten. Also I felt that the message became a bit confusing and moralising towards the end. But all in all, I read it quickly and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks for the reviewer copy.

I’ve heard mixed things about this book. The general consensus is it is a powerful story and is well written, but the subject matters are hard to read and can make the reader uncomfortable, so I was when on the fence when I started.

It is brutal - no beating around the bush here. Everything is so honestly written, whether nice or not, but it is not always as expected. Sex - often depicted as beautiful - is seen in a natural and awkward state, often used as a drug; death - often seen as scary and taboo - is seen as a blessing and a positive. Her depiction of death and grieving is hard to read for those unaccustomed, but for someone who has experienced deep loss, it is all too real.

I admit it is not an easy book to read and it’s not for everyone, so I will leave it to you to decide if it’s your cup of tea, but I do feel all the better, all the more open, the more free, for reading it.

I really enjoyed this book. I did find it quite slow in the middle, but it is so we'll written and enjoyable that I didn't mind

Really enjoyed this novel. The writing is so good, the insights so deep. It’s a fresh take on grief which enters some very unexpected territory. I’d consider it a spoiler to say more.

this story follows amelia, a makeup artist at her family’s funeral parlour, who is filled with emptiness and despair and doesn’t know how to cope with it.

when i first read the synopsis for this book, it sounded right up my alley. i thought that it would be another sad girl book, a book about being in your 20s and dealing with grief and using sex as a coping mechanism, and in a way, it was. but there was something missing from the book for me to fully immerse myself in the storyline, i felt at arm’s length from amelia the entire time, and i didn’t really have a clear sense of who she was. at 240 pages, i actually think that this book would benefit from being around 100 pages longer.

towards the middle of the book, amelia visits a bdsm club. tbh, i’m a massive kinkshamer, i tried to be open minded but i was just left feeling really uncomfortable and uneasy. i’m also scared of blood, and there’s one scene featuring blood which almost made me vomit and i can’t get it out of my head. surprisingly, the bdsm aspect of the book really isn’t that important, and i don’t really understand how these experiences helped the main character.

overall, there were some good pieces of writing within the novel and it’s a quick read. i would encourage those who are interested to read it, but maybe keep your expectations on the lower end of the spectrum. 1/5 stars.

I really enjoyed this book. Baxter has a fresh voice and there were some excellent observations. The parts with the grief for her mother really resonated. I think the author is one to watch.

I was really lucky to be able to read this ahead of time thanks to #NetGalley especially as the synopsis of the book sounded amazing when it hit my email inbox.

What I loved about New Animal aside from some of the grotesque and sexy detailing, was the writing overall. I found the way Baxter wrote about Amelia's grief and heartbreak was so profound and quite beautiful at the same time.

New Animal is equal parts heartbreaking as it is raunchy, which is a combination that you think doesn't work but it does.

I was very much reminded of Boy Parts reading this, which as you ALL know is one of my favourite books of all time. You like but loathe the protagonist in a sense that you understand her decisions but you can't help but want to shake her sometimes.

The only thing I think was lacking was a bit more context on the situation with this Daniel character that seemed to weave in and out, and I feel like it ended quite abruptly. Other than that I massively enjoyed New Animal and would recommend it to anyone after their next fix after Boy Parts.