Is the mother growing more hair, sharper canines, a tail? She thinks so, but her husband laughs off her concerns. Home with her toddler son while her husband travels for work every week, the mother is dealing with a certain kind of despair. She laments the dream job she gave up to be a full-time parent, and the art she misses making. This maybe-turning-into-a-dog thing adds curious flavor to the monotony, though, and leads her to her comforting new library-found companions, the wild and true stories in The Field Guide to Magical Women. And her son loves their new game, playing dog, lessening the mother's despair despite feared judgment from playground mommies and her husband. After a night of bounding and sniffing through her small town on four legs, she wakes up as her woman-self, now called Nightbitch. Yoder's first novel finds catharsis in pushing reality to its fantastic limits. The mother/Nightbitch is sublimely quotable as she skewers society's devaluation of caretaking work and realizes that her art and her life could be the same thing.

A new mother who fears she's going through a frightening and exhilarating transformation leans into the feral side of motherhood. In this myth-steeped debut, an unnamed artist and mother, not having had a solid night's sleep since her son was born more than two years earlier, has begun waking enraged in the night. Her oblivious tech-bro husband travels for work, "rendering her a de-facto single mom" while he enjoys nightly room service, abundant quiet, and a bed to himself, and she tries to adjust to life at home with their child after having made the ambivalent decision to leave her "dream job" as director of a community gallery. In the wake of creating another human with her body (not to mention sleep deprivation and lack of child care), her impulse to create in other ways has been quashed, her mind wiped clean of ideas as she watches grad school friends, who have both children and the necessary support to advance their careers, ascend, with write-ups in the Times, biennials, residencies, and guest teaching invitations. When she confesses to her husband that she thinks she may be turning into a dog, he laughs off her concerns about the changes she's experiencing--coarse hair sprouting from the back of her neck, lengthening canines, a pilonidal cyst that suspiciously resembles a tail. She self-deprecatingly calls herself "Nightbitch," which plants the germ for a new self she incrementally invents and increasingly embodies, with considerable help from a mysterious library book called A Field Guide to Magical Women. Though at points this novel can read as if ticking boxes from a list of notes cribbed from an internet moms' group, it remains a darkly funny, often insightful dive into the competitive relationship and mutually generative potential between art and motherhood and the animalism underlying procreation and child-rearing. It is both a lament for and, at times, a satire of discontented, primarily White, heterosexual cis women who, without sufficient familial or community support, seek out often toxic and sometimes predatory online communities, where their propensities for a certain kind of American middle-class girl-boss elitism are honed toward "mom shaming" and multilevel marketing scams. Disconnected from family and without a strong sense of cultural belonging, even when Nightbitch seeks to create something truly original, like the MLM moms slinging leggings with appropriated patterns, she also colonizes, longing for and profiting from "the things [she] never had." A battle hymn as novel about sinking your teeth into the available options for self-determination and ripping them to shreds. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Yoder's guttural and luminous debut blends absurdism, humor, and myth to lay bare the feral, violent realities underlying a new mother's existence. An unnamed stay-at-home mother lives through a monotonous routine with her two-year-old son, while her kind yet mostly uninterested husband leaves for weeklong work trips each Monday. Things begin to change when the mother notices a patch of hair growing on the back of her neck; spots her new, curiously sharp canines in the mirror; and begins to feel a tail emerging from her lower back. Bewildered by her metamorphosis, the mother searches online for explanations with terms such as "looks like I was punched hard in both eyes." Horrified by the dizzying results, she treks to the library, a zone that promises the comfort of knowledge but is colonized by other mothers ("She actively resisted making friends in a mom context and objected to the sort of clapping and cooing that went on in the library room... the happiness and positivity that would also be mandatory," Yoder writes). She checks out a book titled A Field Guide to Magical Women, which validates her experience and encourages her to embrace the freedom of her new animal nature. Bursting with fury, loneliness, and vulgarity, Yoder's narrative revels in its deconstruction of the social script women and mothers are taught to follow, painstakingly reading between the lines to expose the cruel and downright ludicrous ways in which women are denied their personhood. An electric work by an ingenious new voice, this is one to devour. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (July)