Annie Hartnett Delights with 'Unlikely Animals'

Annie Hartnett visits with us to discuss her newest novel, Unlikely Animals. “It is a book that is about a young woman named Emma who has returned home to a small town in New Hampshire, and she’s got a slight healing touch in her hands that she was born with, so there’s like a touch of magic in it. She’s come home to this small town where she was, kind of, a golden girl. She’s come home having dropped out of med school, so feeling like a failure. She’s come home to take care of her father who is suffering from a mysterious brain disease, and she knows that no matter how much healing touch she ever had in her hands, she doesn’t have enough to cure her father. So it’s a book that is about returning home to someplace, like your hometown, you never thought you’d go back to and it’s about dealing with an aging parent and dying parent, but it’s a funny book. It’s darkly comic and lots of crazy stuff happens.” Due to his brain disease, her father begins to hallucinate and sees animals in his home and strikes a friendship with the ghost of a real-life Dr. Doolittle and naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, who lived in New Hampshire in the early 1900’s.

Fans of Hartnett’s may also notice her frequent use of fifth graders in a couple of her stories. “I love that age group as a fictional device because they’re at the cusp of…they know so much…They have this real internal struggle going on… they both want to be, kind of like all of us, we want to be babied but we’d also would like to be treated like adults. What I love about children in general is that they’re often, like, real experts in something…fifth graders just, they crack me up in a lot of ways, but they’re also very wise.”