Gripped by the characterisation. Feels very contemporary and accurate to present-day life, without being tropey. Very interesting and will look out for this author in the future!

New Animal follows mortuary cosmetician Amelia through a mental breakdown after the unexpected death of her mother, which leaves her hiding from her family in her dad's spare bedroom while she avoids reality by engaging in hypersexual behaviour and trying her hand at sado-masochism.

I don't really have much to say about New Animal. It was simply lacklustre in every conceivable way. It had a lot of elements that I usually love in contemporary novels/lit-fic (it's character-focused, with an unlikeable main character, (view spoiler), which explores kink and other uncomfortable themes), and yet, despite Amelia's scandalous adventures, it was just boring.

I think Ella Baxter aimed to deliver a novel akin to Eliza Clark's works, or Chelsea G. Summer's A Certain Hunger, but unfortunately did not have the writing skill to pull it off.

My first read by Ella Baxter, it was heartbreaking, uncomfortable and great. I found it a little difficult to power through, but I think this was mainly because the book was making me relate to my own life and grief.

I actually wish the book was longer and a bit more closed ended, I think it came very abruptly and that's why it's only a 3 stars. I just wanted to see some development with Victor and Jack, and Amelias navigation through this.

Will definitely be checking out more Ella Baxter, her writing is beautiful.

Amelia's mother unexpectedly dies and this sends her into a spiral. This was an exciting and interesting read which ventures into grief and BDSM lifestyle.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

a very generic take on the young alienated woman. i have read this kind of story before and dare i say done better. baxter can write but sometimes relies on flash over substance.

New Animal follows a young cosmetic mortician named Amelia as she comes to terms with the death of her mother.

This is a raw and searing take on grief, loss, sexuality and self-discovery.

Engaging and exciting from the beginning. A very realistic feel for the reader.
An irresistible slice of escapism and a joy to read. Compelling, absorbing and highly entertaining. Fast-moving and fun! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

MY RATING: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)
Thank you to Pan Macmillan, Netgalley + Ella Baxter for my digital ARC!

READ IF YOU LIKE:
🍂 Raw, sad girl fiction
⚰️ MCs with unique occupations
📖 BOY PARTS / Eliza Clark
👀 Singular POV
🏜️ AUSTRALIAN SETTINGS
🔪 Dysfunctional family relationships
✍🏼 Dry, witty writing style

☁️ THOUGHTS:
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book and I’m not sure how to describe what I thought now I’ve read it. Quirky, dark, moving, unapologetic— ask me to pick one word to describe this book and I couldn’t. Take your pick. Baxter’s debut was a heady mix of macabre, lust and wit.

‘𝘽𝙪𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙮. 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡, 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡 𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙮. 𝙄𝙩 𝙘𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙝𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝 𝙞𝙩 𝙖𝙡𝙡.’

This novel covers some difficult topics, from grief and self destruction, to dissociation and dysfunctional family relationships, but Baxter doesn’t sugarcoat the unique ways of coping with grief and instead confronts the process of mourning head on, presenting a deadpan and captivating insight.

‘𝙊𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙮𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙨 𝙄 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛 𝙞𝙨 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙪𝙨. 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙘𝙝 𝙞𝙩 𝙞𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙜𝙚𝙩 𝙩𝙤𝙤 𝙘𝙡𝙤𝙨𝙚.‘

I can only define this book as an enigmatic fever dream. I enjoyed it and flew through it, but do I remember it enough to tell you what I read? Not especially. But I can say the easy writing style paired with the obscure topic made for a beautiful, intriguing, well balanced read.

I’m not sure what I was expecting with this book but I enjoyed it a lot more than I anticipated. The first 25% was a little slow to be honest but fundamentally this is a book about grief and how we deal with it as individuals.

I found there was quite a bit of dark humour which did have me laughing out loud and although I didn’t necessarily relate to Amelia, I found her to be a really likeable character.

3.5/5

"I should write a book about this. I should tell people how far you travel from the self when grief hoists you out of it."
A debut novel that scarcely feels like one, New Animal slowly tears at the links frequently drawn between grieving and the impulse for self-destruction—particularly that of the sexual kind—and reveals how much dissociation lies in the murky, quicksand-like depths of it. It attaches us to Amelia, a mortuary cosmetician who loses her mother to sudden death, and makes us watch as she comes undone. For someone whose near-circadian proximity to death drives her to seek the anonymous comfort of becoming that "two-headed thing" with strangers night after night, this unravelling comes as an awakening of a different sort: it throws her far away from her body and deep into the throes of her sadness—a heart-fire that permeates, penetrates, and floods everything, "drips like dye into [her] life, slowly colouring everything"—before she can come into her own again.

When Amelia flees her mother's funeral to recoup with her biological father in Tasmania, she only has escape on her mind. Emotions do not come easy to her, especially not when they accompany such a momentous, life-altering change. Now, on an island of her own, she finds herself drawn into the world of kink, ready to extract from it the relief she needs. But it takes a lot more than BDSM to feel better—it takes contact, and connection—and her story takes us through a cataclysmic series of errors, vulnerabilities, and compassions to deliver us to the fact that the only way out of that sticky desolation of loss is to go head-on and through it.

Amelia is a very forthright narrator, and it was her candidness that kept me reading more than anything else—I felt like the book's lot of highlighting the problems with seeing psychological vulnerability as an uneasy entry-point to BDSM often came dangerously close to demonising the whole scene. But I liked the way she, as narrator, felt beholden to the world, I liked how the author articulated her precarity. That felt pretty genuine, and enabled a lot of her ruminations on death and suffering to shock me with their even-handedness and subtlety. Overall, however, it was nothing earth-shattering, especially considering the enormity of the quagmire at its center, but it made me feel something. Just enough to keep me interested in what the author, Ella Baxter, does next. Which, for a first novel, is likely more than enough.

I've seen this compared to Leila Slimani and that feels accurate to me. Despite this being a book that focuses hugely around sex, it didn't feel sexy to me, and I don't think it was meant to. An interesting exploration into the lengths we will go to to feel or not feel things!

Sex and death intertwine in this wickedly funny look at grief, familial bonds and finding yourself after losing yourself for so long. Definitely recommend New Animal.

"I feel an overwhelming reverence for everyone drawn to this industry. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to escort the deceased through their final transitions. There is an Ancient Greek word, psychopomp. It means a guide for the souls to the place of the dead, and the role of the guide is to stay with them until they are comfortable before leaving. In every funeral parlour in this country, people like Shell wait to accompany our loved ones to another place. It’s possible to find great beauty in this job. I knew it when I started and I know it even more so now. It is an honour to work with the dead."

Ella Baxter's New Animal was originally published by Allen & Unwin in Australia in 2021, and in 2022 in the US by Two Dollar Radio, and in 2023 by Pan Macmillan in the UK (from whom, via Netgalley, I received this ARC).

New Animal is a fascinatingly different novel, at least in subject matter if conventional in format. It begins with our first person narrator Amelia Aurelia mid-scene:

"There is a man with kind eyes and crooked teeth in my bed. He’s facing me and smiling, preparing to talk. I cough once, loudly, because talking is unnecessary at this point. We both watched patiently as he prodded my vagina with his hangnailed finger, and we took turns sighing mid-thrust.

Afterwards, Adam squashes my memory foam pillow until it’s wedged beneath his armpit for support. He squints at my framed certificate hanging above the bookshelf. My stepdad Vincent paid for the framing in honour of all the technical skills I had to learn, because he likes to celebrate stamina and effort. My mother even made a cake.

‘Certificate IV in Embalming, awarded to Amelia Aurelia,’ Adam reads aloud."

Amelia, in her late 20s, is a cosmetic mortician in the small family funeral business run her step-father, her mother (who separated from her birth father when she was a few years old), her brother and the two partners in his 'throuple'.

Or at least that is what she does by day, whereas by night she has an active, if relatively conventional, Tinder-fuelled sex-life:

"I’ve told people down at the pub that life rests like a layer of chiffon over a body: one puff of wind and you’re dead. It’s a revelation that doesn’t sit easily with most, but I’ve learned to adjust by compartmentalising. I can separate feelings into imaginary boxes inside the mind. In one box, I put all the delicate, fractured wounds of the bodies I see all day. I fill it up with uncomfortable emotions and images. Then, in another box, I shove all the vivid warmth and liveliness of the people I see at night. I need both boxes, one balancing out the other, me ping-ponging between them."

Amelia's description of the tricks and traumas of her trade is both engrossing and sensitively portrayed.

But her life, and the novel, takes a rather dramatic turn when waking in a stranger's bed after a particularly drunken night, she finds she has multiple missed calls - her mother has had an accident, and by the time she reaches the hospital has died.

Ask if they want to summon a mortician, the family reply that they are the morticians and spring into action. Amelia is hit hard by grief, and, rather self-centeredly, decides to cope by not helping with the funeral preparations, or even attending, but flying down to Tasmania to visit her birth father, en route making sure everyone she meets knows that she has lost her mother.

There her first sexual hook-up leads her into the world of BDSM and the local Kink scene, and some misadventures both portrayed in graphic detail, but also with a comic touch, as she rather spectacularly misjudges her first venture into domination, this fuelled by what she sees as her father's inability to understand her grief (and what the reader sees as two people coping in different ways):

"I sit at the table and implode while looking at photos of my dead mother. I would rather fly to Abu Dhabi and bury myself alive and alone in the boiling sand, because it would still feel better than this. I am so mad that I could hit Jack with my fists to make him understand that it is unforgivable to make a grieving woman sit at a table and look at photos of her mother, who is right now being burnt to pieces, to specks, to dust. Unthinkable. This is more uncomfortable than painting a man in my menstrual blood, more uncomfortable than being flayed alive in front of a crowd. It is so uncomfortable that I need to feel something else of equal intensity. If anyone ever asks why I went back to the Widow Maker, I will tell them it’s because Jack pulled out photo albums of my mother, and I saw the face of the woman I loved—not radiating happiness or joy, but enduring a marriage that didn’t suit her."

But just as the novel seems to be turning into Fifty Shades it takes a rather different tone as, taking up work in a local funeral parlour chain (rather to the horror of her family who regard the chains as bandits), she finds healing while preparing a stillborn infant for burial.

I'm not really sure what to make of this one. The moving portrayal of the 'psychopomp' role of preparing someone's loved one for their final encounter and journey, jars rather with the graphic and comic portrayal of the Kink scene, and, as mentioned, in form this is rather conventional. A slightly odd choice for the RofC list but an interesting read - 3 stars.

3.5 stars rounded to 4

First of all, this is a book about grief and loss. It's about dealing with the death of a mother and working out your coping mechanisms. It will resonate with anyone who has been on a path of self-destruct, even if your mode of doing so was not seeking out kink clubs and BDSM.

It is really well written, and although there were part of it that really made me cringe, the writing was compelling enough to keep me turning the pages. Darkly hilarious, it ticked a lot of boxes for me - mainly that it didn't read like a cathartic self-indulgent circle jerk, that a lot of sex heavy contemporary lit does (I'm looking at you, Normal People and your literary descendants).

I don't know anything about BDSM or the kink scene so I don't feel like I'm really in a position to comment. It is worth reading other reviews from people who do, who raise issues with the presentation of it.

CW: Loss of a parent, BDSM, violent sexual encounter (inc. bull whip)

Quirky, complex and modern, new animal is a superb debut novel about Amelia, an embalmer for her family’s funeral home and she loves her job. The book highlights the journey of grief, and how we all deal with hard moments. I adored the beginning however the middle 1/3 really dragged on.

A cosmetic mortician loses her mother suddenly and develops extreme coping behaviours. A short but punchy novel that really took me by surprise. I didn’t expect to love it, if I’m honest but Baxter writes in such a simple yet poignant way that I couldn’t put this down. It seemed liked a strange premise - girl grieves for mum so turns to BDSM. Turns out, it was 5 star brilliance.

Baxter explores themes such as family, grief, sex and human connection whilst being darkly funny. If you’ve ever lost someone or felt an immense grief, I’m confident you’ll adore this refreshing and witty approach to the subject. Baxter skilfully packs a lot of imagery, metaphor and humour into Amelia’s mourning and self-discovery. She also flashed an uncomfortable light on the selfishness of humans, particularly in our pain and grief. Personally, I vibe with a book that has messy characters that demonstrate just flawed humans can be. It feels real and relatable.

As someone who has immense anxiety around death and couldn’t fathom ever choosing to work with or near death, I did worry this could be a triggering read for me. It was the opposite. It gave me a new perspective on death and those who choose to work in a “morbid” industry. Baxter paints a picture of a peaceful and necessary part of life whilst reminding us all that everyone’s job has an element of the old “9-5” to it.

I laughed out loud. I didn’t want it to end. I’ll auto-buy whatever Baxter brings out next. Read this book!

Genre: literary fiction, dark fiction
Trigger warnings: grief, death, sexual violence
My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Oh my gosh. I did not expect to feel so much whilst reading this book - my heartstrings were pulled, and tears were shed. This book is painful to read and discusses unpleasant topics. 💔

The writing is achingly beautiful and will tug at your heartstrings like there's no tomorrow. "New Animal" is essentially an emotional novel on grief, so please do be aware as it may be triggering for some.

My heart literally hurt for Amelia whilst reading this book, and I just wanted to give her a hug. 🥺

To be honest, I can't really recommend whether you should read this book or not. Simply because it deals with such complex topics that it may be triggering for some. I recommend reading the trigger warnings and more reviews before you decide if you're mentally in the right place to read this book.

Thank you to the author, Ella Baxter, and the publisher for letting me read this early in exchange for an honest review. 🥰

Beautifully toxic and I loved every second, Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.

Sooo chaotic but I loved it.I enjoyed the use of dark humour,it worked really well because there was a nice contrast between it and Amelias grief.Vaguely reminiscent of a couple of books trending on booktok right now that focus on feminine rage such as bunny by mona awad.

TW; lots of sex & BDSM stuff, grief & death.

I had to double check this was a debut novel as I was blown away by the first half of this book. Ella Baxter is definitely one to watch I can’t wait to see what else she comes up with. Read along to follow Amelia’s journey of one night stands which changes following a bereavement. As she navigates her grief she ends up involved in the BDSM world and Ella Baxter takes us along for the ride. Solid 3 out of 5 from me.