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    Chouette
    Chouette
    Chouette
    Audiobook6 hours

    Chouette

    Written by Claire Oshetsky

    Narrated by Julia Whelan

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    ""Claire Oshetsky’s novel is a marvel: its language a joy, its imagination dizzying."" —Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind

    An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis

    Tiny is pregnant. Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.”

    When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother.

    Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.

    The Chouette audiobook features original music composed and performed by Claire Oshetsky’s daughter, Patricia Taxxon.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateNov 16, 2021
    ISBN9780063066700
    Author

    Claire Oshetsky

    Claire Oshetsky is the author of Chouette, which was a PEN Faulkner Nominee, the winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Barbellion Prize. They live in Santa Cruz with their family.

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    Reviews for Chouette

    4/5

    78 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      It'll grow on you. The claws and feathers of motherhood ❤️
    • 4/5
      so beautifully strange. dark and bright... hopeless and so full of hope. I found myself at the beginning wondering why the heck am I listening to this, and by the end I thought I can't stop listening to this! if you can stretch your mind to connect to the allegory presented this is a striking homage to motherhood, love... and all the ways that we think we fail when we succeed and all the ways that we think we succeed when we fail miserably.
    • 4/5
      Well. I'm not even sure how to articulate my feelings about this fantastical tale. The story was very bizarre and sometimes disturbing - a human woman giving birth to an owl-baby - but also oddly beautiful. I was apprehensive about how the author was going to wrap everything up but found the ending to be weirdly satisfying. Definitely a very unusual read.
    • 2/5
      Too bizarre and metaphorical for my taste, especially since I never really pinned down the metaphor.
    • 4/5
      I love a good allegory. This story deals with the demands and complexities of raising a child with extraordinary needs. Where there is no clear right or wrong decisions. It was dark and a bit disturbing at times and it left me with a lot on my mind.
    • 4/5
      As we read through Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette, we dwell in a confusing landscape of fantasy on the one hand, and hardpan reality on the other. Tiny, a diminutive virtuoso cellist, becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby owl. She knows it’s an owl-baby from the moment of conception: there’s an imagined scene in which her owl lover, a female, sleeps with her in a place cryptically called “the Gloaming,” in a tender, sensual scene, and during which Tiny conceives. The author then lets hardpan reality dominate, and result is a unique, quirky flight of fancy requiring agility on the part of the reader.Chouette, Tiny’s daughter owl, proves a challenge from the get-go, even before she’s born. Tiny has a relatively difficult pregnancy, what with talons and a beak inside her, and the birth causes very predictable consternation on everyone but her. The delivering doctor tries to forget what he’s seen, and succeeds rather too quickly. Her husband, at first thrilled with her pregnancy, is repelled by his infant daughter, and never stops trying to turn her into something a little, or a lot, more human. Her husband’s family does its best to repudiate Tiny and Chouette, eventually ostracizing them completely. Tiny’s husband goes along with it.Readers can take Chouette as a very typical example of how a child can be pulled in opposite directions by parents who apparently want very different things for their child. The conflict between Tiny and her once-doting husband rings honest and true, and he sides with his family, alienating Tiny, and making her ever more protective of Chouette. Her husband’s family of five tall brothers and their opinionated wives come through as a single unit of suspicion and rejection. The medical profession fares poorly in this book, too. The doctors are self-absorbed, greedy, dismissive, brusque, and hostile. A woman doesn’t have to give birth to a baby owl to experience any of this.Chouette is spare, well-paced and suspenseful, and contains characters you wish well. It builds with anticipated gloom and failure, and yet does not yield to run-of-the-mill expectation. It will surprise you every time. It does stretch one’s willingness to suspend disbelief, but once you’re on board with the fantasy, its other virtues come to the fore. For me, it’s really a study on one young mother’s struggle to love her baby against odds, and can stand for thousands, or millions, of other mothers in the same boat.
    • 5/5
      With an Eraserhead epigraph, to put you in such a setting, though somewhat more fanciful -- one of my favorite bits is that the good and bad parts of town are called the gleaming and the gloaming. How has no one else thought of this before? Here we have a book from a writer that I know from their Goodreads is an enviable epic reader. And that vast reading shows on these pages. These sentences! These scenes! Tiny is immediately a character you want to hold in your hand like a sleeping baby bird, and Tiny isn't even the baby bird. Though Tiny is the human mother of Chouette, a baby owl. There are plenty of birds flying around these pages... and dogs. Lots of dogs. This book is so well crafted with much obvious love. I loved so much here. It's charming, whimsical but not saccharinely so, with honesty about motherhood and marriage throughout, and plenty of blood shed, not always from the baby owl. As Tiny is a professional musician, a cellist, it's also a very musical book, so it was fun to listen along to the music while reading, thanks to the help of internet music streaming and the handy list of music in the back of the book. I know this writer as a fellow follower of the Morning News Tournament of Books, so being aware of this gem of a book is another reason to be thankful for the Tournament of Books. One of my favorites of the year.