Some plot twists feel a little more forced than others. This tragicomedy delivers as Clive takes a stab at adult parenting before dying and Emma navigates layers of ambiguous loss. Doolittle have to do with the opioid crisis, boomerang children, saintly healing powers, or a Westworld-esque hunting preserve for millionaires? But the reader’s patience is rewarded as Hartnett skillfully draws the string. The first quarter of the book seems like a mess of disparate parts: What does the ghost of New Hampshire’s own Dr. When Emma assumes legal guardianship over her rapidly deteriorating father, the two become embroiled in his dementia-induced obsession: a seemingly hopeless search for Emma’s childhood best friend, Crystal, a heroin addict who has been missing for almost six months. Her father, Clive, who's dying from a mysterious brain disease, is having hallucinations of animals while being haunted by the ghost of (real-life) local naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes. Never a truer word was spoken than when the ghostly inhabitants of the Maple Street cemetery in Everton, New Hampshire, who are the choruslike narrators of this novel, rationalize that “a good story doesn’t always follow an arrow.” In what begins as a slow-paced, meandering tale, Emma Starling, a natural healer and former golden girl of small-town Everton, drops out of medical school and moves back in with her parents. (Apr.An absurdist, laugh-out-loud family drama about intergenerational healing. Hartnett’s whimsical storytelling casts a spell. While the jarring ending is hard to swallow, Hartnett’s clever prose and brisk pacing will carry readers through. Others lend an amusing point of view to the proceedings (“one of the perks of being dead, omniscience within town limits,” one of them says). The ghosts of various dead townspeople weigh in throughout, such as “real-life Doctor Doolittle” Baynes, whom Clive reveres and who now tells Clive what to do.

With the police unconcerned over Crystal’s disappearance, Emma decides to work with Clive to solve the mystery.

When Emma becomes a substitute teacher for fifth graders, she’s drawn back into all the drama of her hometown, including her brother Auggie’s opioid addiction and her mother Ingrid’s unhappiness. Clive was forced to retire from his professorship due to his hallucinations of animals and is now obsessed with finding Emma’s high school best friend Crystal Nash, who has been missing for several months. Emma Starling, 22, drops out of medical school to help care for her father, Clive, who is suffering from a rare brain disease. Hartnett ( Rabbit Cake) delivers a quirky ghost story set in present-day Upper Valley, N.H., inspired by the legacy of naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes.

Unlikely animals book