New Animal

KRISTEN MARTIN, LOS ANGELES TIMES

"... by turns a comedy of errors and a profound meditation on how to find mooring in the world when you have lost your anchor ... Writing about kink could be gimmicky or cringey, but Baxter imbues the BDSM scenes with just the right proportion of levity and self-awareness ... What unites death and sex is the way they force us to confront our bodies; in bringing them together here, Baxter has really written a novel about the limits of the visceral and the need for the mind to sit with the hardest truths, the worst emotional pains, rather than trying to escape them ... Passages like these are some of the frankest and most resonant I have read about what death does to the bereaved. The author has clearly dedicated herself to grappling with death in a way that feels more akin to mourning in the Victorian era than the antiseptic conventions of Aurelia's Funeral Parlor ... In considering her preoccupations in the form of a novel, Baxter has encapsulated the agony of loss and the necessity of contending with it to find the new person you will become."