Once the baby arrives, Tiny’s world transforms yet again. She enters her new role alone, making the second-person address of the baby as “you” an intimate invitation to the reader to imagine what it’s like to be at once terrified and assured of one’s future. Despite her explicit explanation of what’s going on, her husband maintains that it’s the hormones talking, patting her on the head and keeping her at arm’s reach.
Rather than butterfly-like kicks, she’s beset with wing flaps against her organs. Not only does the baby seem to direct her thoughts, behaviors, and speech, as well as render her body ripe with the smell of rotting meat, but at a rehearsal the baby “hijacks fingers” until she concedes and plays a piece the baby approves of.Īfter realizing that her career will need to be put on hold for some time - she can’t risk performing, plus her stench makes being in public a challenge - Tiny becomes totally consumed by caring for the owlet. A professional musician, Tiny is attuned to the fact that the creature gestating inside her can’t possibly be human. Yet Tiny’s question to her unborn child - “How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?” - echoes with a sense of wonder and possibility. From the very first line we know we’re in an unreal reality. Right away, Oshetsky asks us to suspend our disbelief. Through her experience we see motherhood and associated notions of sacrifice, compassion, and belonging upended and redefined. For Tiny is not with child per se - not a human child - but rather an owlet, the offspring of an affair she has with a wild female owl in a dream. Equal parts magical realist and radical feminist, the novel follows the plight of Tiny, a woman whose journey through pregnancy and motherhood vies with the most dramatic of Hollywood depictions. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then Claire Oshetsky’s delightfully disturbing novel, Chouette, offers a nonplanetary paradigm through which to view the female experience: the bestial.
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