This was a very raw, very real book and I loved that there were a pair of siblings at the heart of it. Delbianco is a writer to look out for!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Rough Animals follows twins Wyatt and Lucy, who following the death of their father have managed to survive until one day their farm animal is shot and Wyatt is injured by a girl child. Setting off in pursuit of retribution Wyatt is drawn into a journey that’s rooted in the story’s wild landscapes: brutal and primitive.
This is a surprising debut that’s confidently written, atmospheric in setting much in the style of Cormac McCarthy.

This book was action packed right off the bat and until the very end! I think my heart rate can finally slow now that I've finished with this book. Rae did such an amazing job constructing the characters and with the pacing this story, which was anything but dull! Well done!

It took me a while to get through this book and I will try to sort out why. First I should say I am acquainted with the author in social media and really love her artistic sensibilities and her love for literature.

I think what I love in literature is different from what she loves in literature, so it is more that her book is not a match for my reading tastes. This is western through and through, although the setting is more modern than many westerns. Set in Utah, in a landscape open and bleak enough that it is easy to imagine lawlessness. The characters are young, tough, and have to be wiling to risk everything to survive; there is still an underlying sense that they might not. The stakes are high.

I really connected to the story in the beginning, where the twins who are barely scraping by on the family ranch without their parents, and their cattle have been killed. They discover a girl who is the shooter, take her hostage, she escapes, and shenanigans ensue. This is also where I found myself disconnecting from the story, which seemed to turn into a series of shootups and drug dealings and bodily injury. It was hard to tell which moment was the most climactic moment. It felt like an action film, where the whole point is the explosions and fight sequences - these are the movies I never watch. So as you can see, this just isn't the book for me. I wanted to go back to the sad family story, and the twins survival, but more in the emotional longterm sense, less in the immediate gunslinger sense.

I do love that we are seeing this new wave of westerns, from the alternate hippos of Sarah Gailey to the historical explorations of Carys Davies to the brutal setting of Western Australia in Tim Winton's work. I feel like readers who hook into this movement will also enjoy this book.

More than once I stopped to question what I was doing reading Rough Animals - filled as it was with hardship, graphic violence, drug deals and death.     The answer each time?     Unquestionably, the writing.   Young author Rae DelBianco fashioned her story with intelligent, thought provoking and marvellously descriptive writing.   Words, not beautiful or flowery but gritty and coarse,  completely suited to the Utah desert setting.    How many beautiful descriptions of sunsets have I read over the years but never have I seen nightfall described this way  <i><b> The sky was fanning with darkness like gangrene spreading....</b></i>  and yet in the context it was utterly perfect.  

Right from the outset I was intrigued about the characters history but also their future prospects.   The random shooting of their livestock  likely meant they'd lose their ranch.   I could  feel their desperation.   DelBianco managed to simultaneously repulse me and extract my sympathy with her words.     The lengths taken to wrest recompense for what was taken from them was extreme and this was a study in "the pain of having to kill to survive".  

I daresay this author has a sparkling career ahead of her if this debut is any indication.   My congratulations to her and my thanks to Skyhorse Publishing and NetGalley for the digital review copy received in exchange for an honest review.

Rough Animals was very well written! Reading the back of the book, this is not something I would have normally picked up, but I am so glad that I did! Rough Animals was gritty and enthralling. I can't wait to see what else Rae DelBianco has in store for the future!

This book is a true work of art in that art is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, to push you out of your comfort zone. This story was so well written that I felt like showering after sitting down to read. It's about twins who live alone and are about to lose their property when someone comes along and makes them that much closer to the loss. If you like gritty, dark, rustic stories, this one is for you! Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

Well told story with engaging characters. I really enjoyed reading this book with it's strong plot. It's bleak at times, coarse rough and violent but definitely a story that will keep you engrossed so if you like this type of story this is definitely a book that you should pick up. Will definitely look forward to what this author comes up with next. Happy reading!

Wyatt and Lucy were are twins, just trying to get by on their isolated farm in Utah. Lucy and Wyatt all feel so much older than 23. They have been alone for 5 years since Lucy accidentally shot her father while hunting. Wyatt checks on his cattle and theirs one dead, then two, then three all shot.. Gun fire is exchanged with a young girl, a child. He catches her brings her back to their house,tying her up until they can figure out what to do with her. They will lose the farm now with the death of the cattle. The girl escapes and Wyatt tracks her. He feels he needs some restitution for what she's done. Wyatt has never been exposed to the things that he will encounter now. Biker gangs, drug cartels, shoot outs. Will anyone come out of this alive? This is a raw and gritty book from the heart of a writer that knows what their talking about. This book is well written. The end blew me away. I wasn't expecting it.I received this book from Net Galley and Skyhorse Publishing for an honest review and no compensation otherwise.

Twins Wyatt and Lucy Smith could not be more devoted to each other. Five years ago, their lives drastically changed when Lucy went hunting with father and mistook him for an elk. Wyatt never faulted Lucy but still she "snapped". Now, she seems unaffected by the struggle created by this misfortune. By the tender age of twenty three years, the storms of life were already etched on Wyatt's face. Working their cattle ranch in Box Elder County, Utah, foreclosure seemed likely when a mud covered feral girl, wielding a TEC 9 and a shotgun, killed several steer and injured Wyatt's upper arm.

Knowledge of the forest and a barefoot, silent approach enabled Wyatt, despite his blood soaked arm, to catch the girl. He tied her to a chair, the only piece of furniture in Lucy's bedroom. The loss of these steer signaled the loss of the ranch...unless...$4,600 could be raised. When the girl escaped by breaking a window, Wyatt left the ranch in Lucy's care determined to find the girl and demand what was owed for the cattle.

Wyatt started his search, by truck, heading toward Salt Lake City, Utah. He tracked her by smelling the air, pursuing her the way he would hunt for an animal. In his attempt for restitution, Wyatt and the unnamed girl encountered outlaw bikers, meth labs, drug cartels, and coyotes. Often violent gunfire from rivals ensued. Wyatt and the girl "dance" between friend or foe status. He thinks of home in Box Elder County through flashbacks. Interspersed throughout, we witness childhood lessons in the harsh realities of nature and survival as presented to Wyatt and Lucy by their father.

Wyatt's brutal journey of revenge and retribution was unexpected. It was cruel and devastating. The roughness, however, was tempered by the beautiful prose by debut author Rae DelBianco. This modern day western thriller was an intense read with bloody gunfights and hungry coyotes out for human blood. Clear your calendar, sit down, read and enjoy "Rough Animals" by Rae DelBianco. I definitely did!

Thank you Arcade/ Skyhorse Publishing and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "Rough Animals".

A post-western odissey in a Malebrancheian theodicy.

“Rough Animals” are coarse animals, precarious, imperfect. And the world of RA is a rough, precarious and imperfect world populated by rough, precarious and imperfect people.
It looks like a world consistently drawn on the tropics and meridians of the Cartesian Theodicy. Actually Rae DelBianco drawn his world from others meridians, the “Blood Meridian” of McCarthy’s ouvre and brought into that world a bunch of nietzschean characters, but her world is consistent with the discussions on evil in the Cartesian Era.
Descartes took the agostinian and tomistic solution to the problem of Evil: Deus et natura faciunt nihil frusta, so every thing that has been created is “valde bona” for the fact itself to have been created. The moral evil (the evil done by men) was a negation, a non-perfection which resided in the finitude of the human intellectus, whence born the error, whence born the evil, that is always a “malum poenae.” Natural and Metaphysical evil (the evil done by Nature over men) was a statistical data born from the law of natures, and was in itself so small to be negligible.
That will lead Spinoza to think that evil and good are “only modes of thinking” devoid of objectivity, while Malebranche will go on the opposite direction, maybe following Burnett’s “Telluris Theoria Sacra”, and will see the evil in nature as something real, positive: “Everything enters into the order of Providence, even disorder. But disorder always remains what it is. God permits it,” and so those disorders, such as deserts, drought, illness, other monstrosities, “are the necessary consequences of Natural Laws.”
Rae DelBianco seems to speak Malebranche language, when for example a character says that “in the wilderness there’s no such thing as right”: there’s no right and no wrong, there are only the thing as they are. There is the desert, which is absence of life, presence of death, “spread upon the map from below like a callus on the earth,” where the only form of life is a “greenhouse sat as a leafcolored prism in a wash of ground without color. Like a pocket or a casing, filled with the only thing left alive in the desert,” so that one keep wondering “if the sense of it was something you could survive off of.”
The world depicted by Rae DelBianco is a world where the evil is present everywhere. The difference with Malebranche is that in her world “There is no God and we are his prophets” (to say it with McCarthy), so the characters living in it are bound to find their own solution to the problem of evil, and all of their lives are but “a series of unremarkable struggles against nature with neither triumph nor end” and with no God, no Hope, no nothing, you have to “under the influence of desperation and fear.”
In this world a 23-year-old Wyatt Smith, motherless and fatherless, live with his twin sister on Box Elder, Utah. He tries to adapt himself to a violently indifferent world—he has a glass eye, he feels a guilt for a sin he has not committed (a kind of original sin), he feels responsible for his sister. One day discovers that their livestock (their only form of sustenance) has been attacked and some cows have been killed and eaten raw. He finds out that the attacker was a 14-year-old girl, a tough bad-ass girl who wanders the world with a shotgun in one arm and a Tec-9 in the other. So begins an odyssey that leads Wyatt in search of the fleeing girl. He finds her and ventures along with her in the Utah deserts, through drug Cartels and hungry coyotes. Wyatt is the doubt: he doesn’t know whether the girl is Good or Evil, and apparently he can’t decide whether she is a friend or an enemy. He follows her, interrogates her, he tries to understand what she’s had to understand by herself in a series of dialogues that, although somewhat didascalic here and then, have often the quality of philosophical chitchat on life, violence, time, fate and death.
If Wyatt represent the Cartesian Doubt, the suspension of every judgment, the girl is a nietzschean heroine beyond the evil and the bad, in some way reminiscent of Judge Holden, but a Judge without the knowledge of experience. She has an istinct and a lot of answers, but maybe you won’t want to listen to them.

Encounter Wyatt Smith and his twin sister living a hardscrabble life on a Utah cattle ranch. They are barely making enough to sustain themselves since the death of their father. Checking the stock one morning, Wyatt is shot in the arm by someone who has just killed four of his cattle. The margin for economic survival has just gotten so much more unlikely. Wyatt wants revenge but more than that he wants restitution.
A young feral girl with a violent past and a vicious future is the perpetrator. But she may also hold the answer to how he can make the money back for her deadly spree.
But he must enter her world of drugs, gangs and betrayal to achieve his goal.

So that’s the opening….but this description doesn’t begin to acknowledge the original writing style, the phrases that linger, an underlying creepiness nor the danger behind every action. The girl is adrenaline. Wyatt must keep pace with her and descend to her level if he hopes to live and get the cash. The violence escalates with the suspense. Even the land becomes raw and wild.

This reader couldn’t stop, couldn’t look away and couldn’t wait for the next sentence. Compelling and charismatic – a modern day Western – awaiting the movie and soundtrack!

3 I should have know this book was not for me stars

I should have know that since this book has been compared to those of Cormac McCarthy that is would not be for me. I should have known when it stated that it was gritty, another word for lots of violence that it wasn't for me. I should have known that since this was a contemporary Western novel, a genre that I don't do well with, that this book was just not for me. However, I persevered probably because the prose written was quite extraordinary and the story line which had hints of incest and life in an environment so rough and tumble that it blocked out any semblance of a life I knew, could make me comprehend better the nature of some that drive them to violence and death.

Wyatt and Lucy twins, raised by their father, develop an extremely close relationship. They are one with each other always for I am you and you are me. When one morning Wyatt discovers that one of his steers has been fatally shot he decides to chase the shooter, a young teenage girl. In a shootout more of his herd is killed and Wyatt and the girl both wounded begin a cat and mouse chase through the west that is comprised of dangerous motorcycle gangs, meth labs, and marauding coyotes. This becomes a fevered dream of failed lost hope and unfulfilled desires.

I wished I had liked it better, although for many this will be a novel that focuses on the underbelly of what passes for society that is hidden, malevolent and violent.

Thanks you to Rae DelBianco, Skyhorse Publishing and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book to be published on June 5,2018

Wow wow wow wow! This book is so gripping, from the very first page to the last. I have spent so much time trying to find the words to properly praise this novel. The characters are original, the imargery is captivating, and the storyline sucks you in immediately. I found myself thinking about this book even when I wasn’t reading. Rae is so talented and I can’t wait to read more from this author. Thanks so much to the publisher and author for providing me with a DRC!

Copy furnished by Net Galley for the price of a review.

You don't want to mess with folks from Box Elder County out there in Utah, where even the young are born old.  Harken to the lowing of the cattle and the rhythmic thrum of the cicadas.  Off aways, there lies the desert, dead quiet, prickling in its silence.  Make no mistake, this tale is vivid and visceral, gritty and gut wrenching. 

You are going to want to keep an <b>eye</b> on this new author.  The images she creates with her words will come alive in your mind.  Big thanks to Elyse, who called this novel to my attention.

A huge thank you to Bonnie Brody!!!! Her review gave me chills.
I don’t gravitate toward westerns...but I can’t endorse this book highly enough. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

The writing is an sensational experience!
The characters with blood and death being a constant threat— death a personal memory- injuries- running - fiercely tearing of limbs - gutting with teeth- avoiding another man’s trigger- dying too much like cattle— battling the elements—
thunderstorms—
lightening—
are so deeply in your thoughts.... characters so real ... they are a part of you —best book friends forever.

Nothing I can write will do justice to this book. It’s an experience like no other... a journey that continues to explode page after page.

Wyatt and Lucy Smith - ( twins) - their father - and the mysterious wild child...
will support you through this journey. I didn’t even hesitate whether or not I could handle the fighting - the blood- the hell- because the characters
we’re so compelling and heartfelt- I wanted to be where they were. If they were facing danger - I was going with them.

“Out here the wind could come like something four-legged, like something plodding in drafted rhythm under an ox’s yoke, or it could come like an ocean, a body that, if it had still waters, they were beyond your reach and not what you were made to breathe. If it were like an ocean tonight perhaps the girl would be washed away come morning, washed away with the whole history of it all and his tracking out here and his forefathers footsteps across it years before alongside those of however many of the mules had made it this far into the journey. And if he woke early enough to still see the bloodstain in the sand where she’d lain, Then a few more rushes of wind would surely take that away as well, and then you could go home. You could go home, and it would not be like it had never happened, but in not being able to see it anymore it was still as if something had been undone”.

There were phenomenal sentences to highlight on every page that I finally just stopped trying to hold on too tightly- and just surrendered to the books flow. It was incredible to do that.
It’s very hard to believe that this is a debut..., ‘can’t possibly be’. This writer has skills and skills and skills!!!


I’ll be surprised if the film people aren’t coming after Rae DelBianco already.

It’s soooo visual.
Everything is ‘enhanced’ as if on steroids....
sights, smells, temperatures, inner grabbling with issues between right and wrong...moral choices...

It’s brutal - beautiful- with sweetly tender moments.

Thank You Skyhorse Publishing, Arcade Publishing, Netgalley,
and Rae DelBisnco

Rough Animals is definitely a rough book. I didn’t really understand the motivation of the main character in pursuing the journey that is the meat of the novel. Ultimately, I did not finish this one.

How far are we willing to go to protect what is ours?

A 23 year old Wyatt of Box Elder County, Utah embarks on an ill-fated mission to save his ranch when some of his cattle - his only source of income - gets shot. He leaves his sister Lucy (with whom he's been sharing a rather dark secret... but not one of the incestous kind if that's where your mind goes after ASoIaF/GoT marathons, haha) at the ranch and starts pursuing the attacker, a girl whose name we don't know.

What we never learn is also her motive. There were times when she seemed to be an apparition, not a real, corporeal person who bleeds and dies if their time comes. It was as if she was sent to make Wyatt realize certain truths and face facts he had refused to acknowledge prior to her (overdue? sometimes it seems like it) coming. As if she was never there in the first place! Or maybe she was but fate made her a pawn and put her on Wyatt's path to self-discovery. Then again she comes across as simply TOO MUCH to be a mere puppet and deliver a message to the main character. She's a strong-willed wraith, one of flesh and blood.

Rae's prose was spectacular. Whereas I am not yet sure how to rate or judge or eloquently review this entire story, I am positive that her penmanship was beyond a simple label of 'well written'. It was simply incredible. Her descriptions of the vast, brutal, deep South will haunt me for a long, long time. Even the crude dialogues -- they will stay with me, too. I wouldn't want to meet any of the characters. They were all terrifying creatures, byproducts of hard times, impossible circumstances, wrong choices made over and over again. But a part of me, a curious, self-destructive part would love to hitch a ride with them and see for herself what it is really <i>like</i>. To observe, if only through a keyhole, a bunch of meth-heads get high and rough (that scene! oh my god!).

I should have hated that world but I guess I just ended up loving how ugly it was, how frightening and unlike anything I've ever known. There was beauty in that ugliness and all the more so thanks to Rae DelBianco's beautiful way with words. It wouldn't have been a great story if it hadn't been for the words that helped paint it (and that greatness also means it didn't deliver things on a silver platter, rather it demanded of a reader a certain amount of cunning and intelligence to figure things out on their own).

Raw, gripping and painfully realistic -- even for someone who can only rely on their imagination to conjure up that kind of broken down world as depicted in 'Rough Animals'. I don't know if my rating of 4 stars is accurate and corresponds with what I have written about the book. Perhaps it doesn't. I'm just still pondering. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. It is possible it'll jump up to 5 stars, even if simply because it is absolutely unlike anything I have ever encountered.

**massive thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Hard to believe that this is a debut novel. Intense thrills, visceral violence and a distinctive literary bent make this novel a cut above similar fare. Only complaint is the novel is over literate in spots which slows the pace of the book. Will look for author’s next book.

Thank you Net Galley for the preview of this upcoming novel. Rae DelBianco understands the power of words; I believe this young author will be a force. I don't normally stay up all night to finish a book, but I could not put Rough Animals down. There are comparisons being made to Cormac McCarthy; I'd say they are spot on. I also see parallels with Larry McMurtry, Steinbeck and Faulkner. For me, the story of Wyatt and Lucy evoked memories of George Eliot's Maggie & Tom Tulliver because of the unique and tender relationship between twins. The amazing development of the character we know only as "The girl" reminds me of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander -- she is that tough. The quality of the prose is remarkable . . .the narrative is full of organic descriptions of unique characters and their brutal struggle for survival in unforgiving western landscapes. DelBianco is masterful at building atmosphere; we taste, feel and smell the world of Box Elder. Rough Animals is raw -- this is not a warm and fuzzy read. And yet, the reader is given some resolve in the end. DelBianco wove an epic tale around a resilient and uncommon cast. What I found so compelling is that amidst the guns and drugs and death, there were loving moments of tenderness -- quite a tall order. Highly recommend.