Bad animals A novel

A library worker is accused of voyeurism in Braunstein's pulsing second novel (The Sweet Relief of Missing Children, 2011). When Maeve Cosgrove is laid off, she blames Libby, a troubled teenager who claimed Maeve watched her fool around with a boy in the public library restroom. Maeve's resentment grows after famed author Harrison Riddles agrees to speak at the library, a program she had been working to book for months. With her husband away on a work trip and her daughter spending summer break elsewhere, Maeve feels like the world is against her. "Everything's gone at once," she complains to a friend. Desperate to feel needed, she jumps at the chance to assist Riddles with his next novel, based on the life of local Sudanese refugee Willie. Simmering with rage and desire, she is determined to get what she wants, regardless of the consequences. Exploring themes of appropriation, obsession, and control, Braunstein's tangled novel will leave readers unsettled.

A small-town Maine librarian gets into a peck of trouble. Plot #1: Maeve Cosgrove is called to her supervisor's office, where a woman from the Office of Family and Child Services has come to talk to her. One of the library's regular visitors, a teen named Libby, has filed a complaint: Maeve has been watching her have sex with a boy in one of the library's bathroom stalls. The girl is in foster care, and the boy is developmentally delayed, and Maeve insists it didn't happen, but eventually it seems it more or less did, sort of. Maeve might be let off the hook, but if she wasn't obsessed with the girl before, she certainly is now, and then she loses her job anyway, supposedly due to budget cuts. Welcome to Plot #2: Maeve has been writing letters to Harrison Riddles, a famous author who summers in Maine. She's told him all about her beloved library and co-workers. Now, it turns out, he's going to write a book based on the life of Willie, a Sudanese refugee who's the boyfriend of Maeve's fellow librarian Katrina. Since Maeve's husband is perennially out of town on business and her daughter has flown the nest, Maeve, now jobless, is available to get very tangled up in this other situation. It takes a while to sink in that she is not an easy person to root for, but once it does, it complicates an already overcomplicated book, which touches on everything from abuse and empathy to literary appropriation, ventriloquizing, and the idea of the Magical Negro. A few chapters are narrated in first person by the characters, and toward the end the book floats the idea that it's been authored by a real-life Maeve, hiding her secrets "in plain sight," and then a strange last chapter suggests--well, you'll have to figure it out. Full of ideas, plot, verve, interesting scenes, and good writing, but just a little too full. A writer to watch. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.