Thank you NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I had a really hard time connecting with the characters in this book, I honestly disliked more of them than I liked, Which is mostly due to some of the characters being pretty bad people. The idea of the story is great, a young girl, Jo, who has a secret little sister Lee, that lives out in the woods and no one knows she exists except for Jolene. An event occurs where Lee attacks 2 people and now Jolene needs to make a decision, does she side with her sister and run away or side with other people in her town and stay away from her sister. The characters would make the oddest choices and that really effected how to story was portrayed, I wanted to stop reading so many times because I was getting so frustrated. The ending made me feel a little bit better though, not as much as I had hoped .

I thought there were some interesting things going on in this book, but unfortunately, they never seemed to come together in a meaningful way for me.

A weird and creepy story, no less enjoyable for its eccentricities.

** Content warning for child abuse, domestic violence, addiction, mental illness, and misogyny. **

"I hide myself as much as I hide my sister. I hide the person I am when I’m with her. When I was a kid it was easier. How I acted in the day wasn’t much different from how I acted at night. Outside of school at least, the kids of Lester roved about, playing in the woods behind someone’s house or alongside the train tracks, fighting with sticks, running races, trying to catch fish in Monday Creek, acting out plays with dead bugs as the actors. But as I got older, there were more and more things that weren’t acceptable or cool, especially for a girl.

***

"I added them all to the secret half of me."
"That’s the one thing we do all have in common. Pretty much every kid I know is looking forward to the day when they can escape this place. Savannah dreams about moving to a city. She’s always going on about her second cousin in Cincinnati. Other kids talk about heading up to Columbus or down to Delphi.
"Me, though, I already escape every single night."

***
"We are lambs who refuse to learn, I think. We will wander until the end of our days, not afraid of wolves. But together. Always together."

***

Fifteen-year-old Jolene “Jo” Richards has a sister – an identical twin only she knows about. Lee is a wild thing, a feral child, who lives in the national forest that surrounds their hometown of Lester, Ohio. At night, Jo sneaks out her bedroom window to run with Lee. By day, she pretends to be an ordinary, unexceptional girl.

Well, as “normal” as a kid like her can be; it’s hard to stay under the radar when your mom is missing and presumed dead, a likely teenage murder victim. Jolene, for whom Jo was named, had Jo at fifteen. When Jo’s grandmother Margaret found out about the pregnancy, she kicked her daughter out of the house. For a while, Jolene lived in a double-wide trailer on the outskirts of town with “the Cantrell boys” (said in ominous tones, natch), Logan and Brandon. Logan, the older of the two, was widely considered bad news: he sold drugs, abused women, and is possibly Jo’s father. (It’s hard to know for sure; Jolene was “friendly,” as they like to say.)

The last time anyone saw Jolene alive, she was enormously pregnant and pounding onion rings at the bowling alley – in the company of none other than Logan and Brandon. A week later, Brandon showed up on Margaret’s doorstep and thrust a newborn baby into her arms. Now Jo lives with her Aunt Aggie … and haunts the night with a specter that only she can see.

When a teenage boy is attacked in the woods, Jo the only witness (it happened during her first kiss, the horror), the crime sets off a cataclysmic chain of events. For nearly a decade, Jo has tried to keep Lee hidden, a secret. Lee is wild and paranoid and free; discovery equals captivity, imprisonment, domestication. Maybe even scientific study. Certainly death – if not of Lee’s body, then her spirit.

But is Jo willing to trade her own freedom for Lee’s? After all, the girl who attacked that boy wears Jo’s face. Everyone thinks it was Jo who ripped out a boy’s throat during a midnight makeout session. As if her rep wasn’t already sketchy enough.

SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is, well, kind of bonkers, and I mean that in the best way possible. I try not to shy away from 3-star books, because every once in awhile I’m delightfully surprised by a story that everyone else seems to hate – or hold ambivalent feelings for, at best. (See, e.g., THE BLONDES by Emily Schultz.) SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is 110% one of those books: it’s bizarre and meandering and the plot never seems to lead where you think it will.

It defies easy categorization. Is it a mystery? A supernatural thriller? A horror story? A psychological study? A cultural critique? All of the above?

SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is its own beast, and it’s what I love most about it.

If I had to sum it up as a mashup, I’d pitch SOME KIND OF ANIMAL as THELMA & LOUISE meets OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS (or insert your own YA survivalist story here), maybe with a touch of THE GRACE YEAR. It’s so many things, but at its core beats a fierce feminist heart. This is a story about sisterhood, in both the literal and larger sense. About the way society judges women – and conditions women to judge one another.

Through Jolene and Jo and Lee and Savannah, Moore interrogates slut shaming and woman hating. Collectively, they are living, breathing illustrations of how society prefers its women dead and tragic – and maybe just a little bit sexy – rather than alive and wild and in control of their own sexuality. Each is a fascinating character in her own right, but it is their relationships with one another that truly sparkle and ignite.

SOME KIND OF ANIMAL is also a compulsive thriller; more than a hundred pages go by before Moore lets use know whether Lee is simply a figment of Jo’s imagination (no spoilers here!). There’s a supernatural, otherwordly vibe to the story that I adore; these pages are populated by the night creatures, and I half expected a witch or vampire to emerge at some point. The pacing is pretty wild, too; it feels like you’re reaching the climax of the story about halfway through – but, alas, there are still 190 pages left! Where will Moore lead us next? (Astray, hopefully, because these liminal spaces are where the magic happens.)

Anyway, I’m glad I snagged an ARC before the reviews started rolling in; I might have passed on it otherwise. It’s the kind of story you either love or hate, and I fall firmly into the former camp.

“People always think teenage girls are stupid, or naïve. Like we are fawns wandering out onto the highway, like we don’t know about the things people out there want to do to use, like we aren’t steeped in that shit from the moment we hit adolescence.”

Some Kind of Animal is a gritty, twisting, feminist thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat, constantly wondering how it would end. This book was not what I expected, not by a long shot, but I ended up truly enjoying it. I expected a dark, fantastical story of a mysterious sister in the woods, and instead found a face-paced and at times disconcerting coming of age narrative of what it means to be a woman growing up within a rigid patriarchal system.
The plot itself—a girl with a mysterious twin sister who lives in the woods that no one else knows about—should be enough to entice anyone interested in darker YA. But what kept me hooked was the mystery, the setting, and the characters. Some Kind of Animal is full of plot twists, some more shocking than others. I think readers will formulate strong opinions on the characters—they all make mistakes, they all are flawed, and at certain moments in the book I felt somewhat annoyed by all of them. But that’s life, isn’t it? Nobody’s perfect all the time, and this book really gets at that point.
I would definitely recommend this book for those looking for a more mature young adult title (although I’m a firm believer that everyone can read YA and that teens need to be given more of a voice in the genre, but this book does touch on some dark subject matter). It’s a wonderfully written novel, and I can’t wait to see what the author has in store for us next!

Riveting from the start, this story hooks you and refuses to let go.

Jo’s life is a mess of tightly-furled secrets. When they begin to unravel in damning ways, Jo races into the woods to find her feral sister, Lee. In the heart of the forest, Lee reveals the truth of where their supposedly-murdered mother went, how Lee survived, and why their tiny town isn’t safe for Jo to go back to. Lee insists they have to run, and the story becomes a fast-paced, ever-darkening journey.

While I wanted Lee and Jo to find some safe way to integrate back into the civilized world together, I knew it would never accept them. They are two halves of their mother’s heart, just as wild, just as feral. The ending gave me hope Jo and Lee could grow the way they were always supposed to: together.

I don't know if I've ever been so frustrated by a book I flew threw so fast. SOME KIND OF ANIMAL got me out of a reading slump. Romasco-Moore is such a talented writer. I fell into the prose and voice, and the premise hooked me from page one—how can I resist a feral sister? It was such a weird book, and I love, love weird. After the first quarter of the book, I was sure this was going to be a hit for me. Maybe even an all-time fave.

What ultimately left me feeling let down, though, is how the MC, Jo, never faces consequences for the terrible things she does and says. In fact, the narrative seems to twist itself around to forgive her—forgive her for being an awful friend to Savannah, forgive her for getting two innocent people KILLED. The ultimate takeaway is that "people suck" and, I don't know, that's just too nihilistic for me.

This had a really great premise, but the execution fell short for me. The repetitive narrative, mixed with the ending that left much to be desired just outweighed the atmospheric writing. I would certainly give this author another try in the future, and perhaps teens and sporadic readers of the genre will find this one riveting and unique.

Typical coming-of-age novels include a protagonist who forced to confront their sexuality, question their faith or religion, testing boundaries and rebelling, a journey, etc. Well, this isn't your typical coming-of-age story! It is so much more. Jo's story is raw, bloody, dangerous, scary, even feral. Therefore, all those typical coming-of-age characteristics are explored so much more honestly! Side characters are mostly really odd, in such a strong way, that they really just become metaphors for the unstable and frightening process of losing childhood innocence. These characters are really more about the sometimes painful acceptance humans must realize as they confront the past and scenarios in which they are created and the threats of the uncertain future.

Each night Jo, an orphan raised by an aunt and "owned" by a grandmother, sneaks out to run the wild forest that lines her town. She goes to the woods to meet her "sister". The intriguing suspense of who or what Jo's sister is exactly draws the character into the story fast. This review will not share any more than that, because the story is just too good and should not be ruined with spoilers.

This book should be purchased by libraries, teachers, and any reader. It would be an excellent choice for book clubs and will interesting to all genders.

I was given an early release copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was really disappointing for me, which I hate to say because the cover and synopsis are both so intriguing that the second I saw that it was available to request, I jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, the plot and pacing seem to struggle with any sort of device that would compel the reader forward. The characters are all pretty flat, things happen for seemingly no reason - with little to no repercussions or explanation most of the time -, and the ending didn't provide the payoff I was hoping to get after slogging through the rest.

This was my first book by this author, It was pretty enjoyable. I would give this book a 3.5 star rating! It was a pretty Quick and easy read!

I wanted to like this book, but it went too far from reality or somewhat believable and though it was well written and I really enjoyed it at first. I found myself struggling to finish it halfway through. Well developed characters, unique story, there truly was a lot to love about this book, but I was hoping for a thriller that might be plausible in real life. Thank you net galley for the opportunity to read this!!

Seeing this recommended for fans of Sadie, I was extremely excited to pick up this book. The cast of characters are weird and definitely leave you with questions. Unfortunately there is an excessive use of language that doesmt seem necessary and this book seems to require a certain suspension of disbelief. I think the use of paranormal in descriptors is also misleading. Overall, not the book for me.

This was a rather interesting read. I have to admit I do think it was rather long and didn’t need to be almost 400 pages, but it was a gripping read. I wanted to keep reading once I got about 30% into it.

The concept for this book is intriguing, but it didn't deliver, for me at least.
It's painstakingly unrealistic and I couldn't get over that.

The covered intrigued me right away. I was creeped out just from reading the synopsis and decided this would be a book to read during the day and not night. I loved the small town setting.

Jo is a teenage girl living with her aunt, who has a secret twin sister that lives in the woods. No one knows that Jo has a twin sister, so when she attacks someone, everyone thinks it's Jo. I had guessed that this book would have the plot twist that has been done so many times before: that Jo's sister was just imaginary. I think this plot twist is over done, so I'm glad that it wasn't done here. This book was pretty weird, but interesting.

**Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Some Kind of Animal
by Maria Romasco-Moore
Pub Date 04 Aug 2020
read courtesy of Netgalley.com

I so so SO want to give this book 5 stars, but one thing keeps me from doing it: I'm not a prude by any means, but when a pastor curses like a sailor in front of a 9th grader, the story loses a star. ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ I really regret it; it's a fantastic book, but the gratuitous extreme foul language is shock value and not characterization.

Regardless, I loved this book. It was so fresh; it told a new story and kept me engaged the whole way through. Part bildungsroman, part adventure, part suspense, part horror, it tells the story of a multi-generational dysfunctional family. The main character, Jo, is one of the most believable, age-appropriate characterizations I've ever read. Hearing the story from her point-of-view adds to the vividly impaired and maladaptive family life that moves the story forward.

There's something about the book that reminds me of The Bad Seed by William March. The reader doesn't know who is trustworthy, and that creates a lovely tension. The twist at the end was so well set up that I didn't expect it; does that make sense? It was hidden in plain sight.

I'm going to quote something from the book that doesn't give anything away but demonstrates the skillful characterization:

Savannah would absolutely lose her shit if I told her that I'd slept over at some guy's place. That he was offering me coffee now. It seems like a very grown-up thing. To be offered coffee in the morning by a stranger.

That resonated with me as something a 9th grader would absolutely feel.

The title itself is worthy of an entire discussion. Bravo. But $%FYU^^%F.

Starting off, I really wanted to like this book. I read it in its entirety and I had some problems with it. Aside from the fact that it is completely unrealistic, I feel that we don't get to know or understand any of the characters in the book. Jo's thoughts are given to us as she is dealing with the situation with her sister, but her actions don't seem to always line up with what we know about Jo. I also believe that this book would've been much better if we could've gotten Lee's point of view about their mother and about growing up in the forest.

I wanted to like it, it had some good potential, but the ending was a disappointment and felt even more unrealistic than the rest of the book.

Thank you NetGalley and Publisher for this early copy!

Did not finish - I could not connect with the plot or writing so I decided to put it down.

I'm so sad to say that this one is a DNF for me. The premise sounded amazing at first. I was a huge fan of Sadie so the comparison in the summary had me so excited.

Unfortunately it is an unbelievable story and the characters feel flat. I hate to, but I'm putting this one down after reading half.

Okay, so first of all I was deeply confused by the comparison of this book to Sadie. I don't see the connection and it gave me wildly incorrect expectations of what this story would be about.

Now that I've said that-- it wasn't bad. Was it the greatest thriller I've ever read? No. Primarily because I couldn't seem to predict or understand half of what Jo did throughout this story. But I still enjoyed it. Its pacing was solid, the premise interesting-- just needed more on the character side for me.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this advanced copy!