This one was really weird and I just couldnt relate to it at all since I'm not a mother but if that is the intention then it succeeded.

I enjoyed it since the journey of motherhood is one I know. I thought it was interesting how she wanted to learn more about how animals deals with pregnancy and children. Overall all the information was fun and I did learn some facts that were curious. But it was kind of slow and I kept loosing interest. It was also a bit repetitive but part of the subject was familiar to me.

I was drawn to Helen Jukes's memoir Mother Animal because it promised to integrate her experience of pregnancy and early motherhood with scientific anecdotes about what motherhood looks like in other species – ranging from bonobos to spiders to polar bears to burying beetles. And to be fair to Jukes, the first two carefully-crafted sections of this book, which cover her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, do that very well. Jukes is good at conveying the displacement and confusion she feels as she tries to tie together her emotions for her new baby and the stories she's been told about motherhood. 'Are you feeling connected with the baby?' the midwife asks when she's heavily pregnant. 'The question seemed mildly ridiculous. How to experience a connection with a being that was not yet separate from me?' After the birth, she feels 'weird, ecstatic, wired... My boyfriend had wheeled the baby off down the corridor to let me rest, but without her there beside me I felt even weirder than before. Was this my instinct, kicking in?'

I especially liked reading about 'alloparental' behaviour in species that separate maternal behaviour from biological motherhood - something I've been thinking about a lot recently is how we assume that 'maternal' people want to be mothers, and are good ones, whereas 'non-maternal' people are not - or that you can only be 'maternal' if you have your own children. But as Jukes describes, baby bats are raised in all-female roosts that include those who have never themselves given birth, with alloparents supervising children when their mothers hunt. Many species nurse other individuals' offspring and some, like dwarf mongooses and beluga whales, can lactate to feed babies even when they are not parents themselves.

Unfortunately, after the first two sections, Mother Animal takes a strange turn that seems to have been fed by Jukes's own obsessions during her baby's early life, info-dumping a lot of undigested facts about microplastics, 'forever chemicals' and the ways in which pollution lingers in our porous bodies, especially in supposedly 'pure' substances like breast milk. It's repetitive and frankly, not very interesting (Naomi Booth makes the same point much more briefly and powerfully in her novel Sealed ). Jukes's limited scientific expertise is clear so we just get lumps of facts that seem to have little to do with what this memoir was meant to be about and read a bit like a Wikipedia entry ('Both DDT and PCBs belong to the "dirty dozen", a group of highly toxic persistent chemicals that were either banned or heavily restricted at the Stockholm Convention in 2001'). By this, I'm not suggesting that Jukes didn't research these facts herself. Indeed, the amount of research she did seems to be what's overwhelming the more intimate, individual parts of this book.

A very interesting read but I personally just couldn't connect with it as much as I would have hoped.

This book is unlike any other I have read. Intermingled with the central memoir are long meditations on environmental pollutants, mixed with quirky anecdotes about 100s of different animal species. The author uses these factoids to explore what is unique about mothering human children, vs what is purely animalistic and primitive. It reads a little like a fever dream, poetic and eerie and emotional and chaotic and horrifying all at the same time. It made me feel more connected to my womanhood and divine femininity, while also uncovering new fears about birthing children. It's raw, breathtaking, and beautiful, while sometimes making you dizzy with the lack of structure. Definitely a book I won't forget.

I thought this book was very informative and interesting. However, for me the memoir parts of this just did not connect with me as much.

I’m not a mother, so the memoir part of this book didn’t appeal too much to me (other than making me happy that I decided to remain childless). I read this for the non-human animals and I wasn’t disappointed. Jukes is not a scientist, she just started researching motherhood in animals while she was pregnant. The facts are anecdotal and disorganized and a pleasure to read. “Did you know?” is also my refrain while talking to my loved ones, and nothing fazes me. The parts about human pregnancy were equally fascinating. This is a short, poignant and engrossing account of the author’s thoughts and life experiences. Not my usual fare but I enjoyed it a lot.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Elliott & Thompson.

Silent Spring meets Matrescence in this powerful yet accessible exploration of motherhood across the species, investigating the impact humans are having on nature with our incessant creation of chemicals and waste. An honest and unflinching look at the dissonance of motherhood and of how we humans revere nature as we destroy it.
It made me wonder at nature’s power and rage at what we have done, are doing, to it and our children. A beautiful, terrifying, rage inducing, gentle yet furious book that I will be pressing on all my fellow mothers. Absolutely brilliant!

I've previously read and enjoyed A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes. I. really enjoy the way she melds writing about the natural world with memoir and events going on in the human world. I love that she reminds us firmly that we are part of the animal world and that we are connected to it in much wider and more complex ways than we imagine.

Here in Mother Animal, she does the same kind of work but unpacks her feelings about pregnancy and the first years of being a mother. As she finds herself increasingly alienated from other people and sometimes the wildness of her own body, she is drawn to research what mothering looks like across the vast complexities of nature. I really loved this although the sections where she starts exploring porousness and the effects of pollutants and toxins on mothers and babies was really upsetting stuff.

This is not a cutesy look at becoming a mum. This is difficult, painful and tender in every sense of the word. It's quite stunning in lots of ways. I finished it with the breathlessness I usually reserve for thrillers.

Jukes talks abou her own experience as a mother (animal), and interesting aspects about mothers in the animal world.
The themes and the blurb excited me so much. The author’s personal and professional experiences are easy for me to relate to.
The execution was imbalanced for my tastes.
I will keep this author in mind, and I am sure many readers will enjoy this book more than I did. Perhaps it was too close to my heart and readings, I expected more about the wild creature mother aspect.

Helen Jukes has written a beautiful memoir of her pregnancy her thoughts her emotions.Thoughtful and revealing as her pregnancy grows.#NetGalley # Elliottbooks

Mother Animal by Helen Jukes is a book in a similar vein to Matrescence by Lucy Jones as it explores pregnancy and motherhood in both humans and animals.

Helen Jukes does a beautiful job in telling this memoir and the stories in this book. I was enjoying what I read and thought the writing style was everything that I was looking for. It was a intimate look in Helen Jukes’ life and was appreciating that I got to read this.