The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson starts with a simple yet weird premise: a reporter is assigned a story in a dinky town (whose entire economy is centered around horses) because there is a rumor that a horse birthed a human baby. Okie dokie. It’s so preposterous, which is why Carolyn Marshall (just called Marshall the whole novel??) was sent by her boss. “Something” happened (we don’t know until about 70% through the story) to Marshall that made her a little crazy, so this rinky-dink story in a rinky-dink town is supposed to be a stepping stone for a reporter who won’t stop working but should.

I’ve already used a ton of parenthesis, but that’s okay. I have a lot of parenthetical feelings about Anderson’s novel. Chapters are narrated by different characters, like Marshall, Roswell (the father of the baby birthed by a horse), Agatha (Rosewell’s mom), Jason (a police officer), Aaron (a drug addict found with a migrant worker’s dead body), etc. The chapters didn’t feel like separate characters, making me wonder why Anderson didn’t use a third-person omniscient narrator. Jump around in their lil character heads, you know?

I did love the mystery of The Unmothers. It has that vibe like “The Lottery” in which everyone knows what’s up except the reader until we get to the concluding paragraphs. With Anderson’s novel, a total of 317 pages, nothing is really clicking into place until about page 220 (like why Marshall was assigned such a “silly” story and what’s what with that whole our-horse-birthed-a-human thing).

There are clues along the way that make you think “DUH, I get it,” but those clues are not supported by a more direct plot around them. For example, Marshall asks herself, “Did horses usually have blue eyes? Dogs had blue eyes. She supposed horses could have blue eyes, too. It was weird, though. The creature didn’t look right. It looked like a baby horse with human eyes.” She’s a total outsider with no horsey knowledge, is what we can get from this, but also, what’s up with the horse eyes? This isn’t a Mercedes Lackey book.

Anderson’s last 100 pages are thrilling, with a dangerous fog rolling in, a beast in the woods that needs someone to keep up his/her end of their bargain, and the women of said rinky-dink town handling their business: “They’d just walked in. They were just women he knew, mothers and girl scout leaders and PTA members. They were just going into a house.” If Anderson wanted to make a feminist rage novel that includes horses (and Anderson is a skilled horse person herself), why spend so much time with vagaries for over 200 pages, leaving us wondering about the person from Marshall’s past (I couldn’t sus out if it was her husband, son, boyfriend, brother, what) and if the horse-baby thing were real? The beast in the woods reminded me more of the spirit from Princess Mononoke than something to be bargained with, and it only makes a rare appearance.

Truly, there is loads of potential here, but not enough secret conversations between the townspeople about what’s going on, which would have ramped up the tension. It’s almost as if they’re in the dark with me (they’re not).

Books of Fall 🍂🎃🍵

• Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Just Desserts by G.A. McKevett
• Slewfoot by Brom
• She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall by Dave Newman
• Submerged by Hillel Levin
• The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson
• Homing by Sherrie Flick (DNF)
• The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
• Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
• The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
• Quest for the Unknown: Bizarre Phenomena by Reader’s Digest
• Icebreaker by Hannah Grace
• A Life in Letters by Zora Neale Hurston
• Ask Elizabeth: Real Answers to Everything You Secretly Wanted to Ask about Love, Friends, Your Body — and Life in General by Elizabeth Berkley
• No Good Deed by Allison Brennan (#10)
• Bitter Thirst by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs #8)
• Deaf Eyes on Interpreting, edited by Thomas H. Holcomb and David H. Smith
• Compassion, Michigan by Raymond Luczak
• Fat! So? by Marilyn Wann
• Syd Arthur by Ellen Frankel