Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I first heard about Nightbitch on a podcast, though I don’t remember which one. All I know is that it was a short read about a woman who turns into a dog. Something about that concept really got its fangs into me that day. So I stuck it on my TBR and checked it out from the library app Libby when it came up in my queue recently.

I thought that Nightbitch would be a werewolf story, or maybe something about a raw-meat-eating superhero. It is not either of those things. Nightbitch is part feminist metaphor, part cryptid. I love all of her.

In Rachel Yoder’s 2021 debut novel Nightbitch, a mother is at her wits’ end. With her husband always traveling for work, and no friends to speak of except for the picture-perfect mommies she usually avoids at the park and library, she finds herself overwhelmed by the seemingly endless demands of motherhood. She feels taunted by futile dreams of a good night’s sleep and memories of her art world career that she gave up for…well, this. But one day, something changes. Suddenly she’s not just a mother. She’s something more. Maybe it has something to do with the new patches of hair growing on her feet and the back of her neck, the fanglike sharpness to her teeth, this inexplicable craving for bloody meat. And from amongst all these canine trappings comes an inner voice telling her to break free. Where does this new version of herself, this Nightbitch, fit into an increasingly demanding world of contemporary mommyhood?

Some of the tropes in this book:
Workaholic Husband
Unnamed Protagonist
Modern Fairytale
Burnt Out Mom
Transformation
My Instincts are Showing

I loved the honesty and vulnerability in this story. I loved how parts of it are so beautiful, while other parts are quite graphic. I loved the way it rips on MLMs while being compassionate to the women in them, and how relatable it is overall. And then on top of all that, the thing has this fairytale cadence that ends up being charming once you get used to it—I initially didn’t care for an unnamed main character and the omission of quotation marks, but it stopped bothering me pretty quickly once I was hooked by the story.

The mother/Nightbitch as a character was a treat to read. She is sympathetic and flawed, and it’s impossible to resist rooting for her even during parts when her shapeshifting causes her to make poor decisions. She feels like a fully-realized person and it’s easy to become immersed in her tale.

There are many plot threads that I wish received a little more attention—little interesting tidbits that always seem like they could be something and then never really get there. I’m talking about things like the true identity of Wanda White, or what the deal is with those three dogs that keep showing up, or what happens to the mom who disappears into the cornfield during the MLM party. Even the whole arc with her husband being away and distant all the time gets resolved rather ambiguously. These are all tantalizing trails I hoped the plot would follow through with, but Yoder abandons them in favor of long, florid lists of things Nightbitch has to do or wishes she could be doing. In this, I think this book must be trying to evoke authentic feelings of being a mother—you can’t just live your life and follow the interesting plot threads, there is annoying shit here that needs your attention.

By the way, if you are bothered by violence toward animals, skip this book. It’s not a huge part of the story, but Nightbitch definitely does rip apart some small cute animals like a dog would do. There is one particular scene in which the killing is described in graphic, visceral detail.

I also wondered: Where are Nightbitch’s neighbors during all the events of this book? They never seem to be around while she’s being undressed by a pack of free-roaming dogs, running around the neighborhood naked on all fours, or hunting down and killing small urban mammals with her bare hands. That right there is the most fairytale thing about this story: surely someone would have called the cops.

Complaints aside, though, I see Nightbitch sticking with me. I’m sure I’ll be re-reading it in the future. There is something comforting in the humanity and triumph of Nightbitch herself. By becoming doglike, she throws off the shackling expectations of society and the patriarchy. She gains a confidence in her feminine instincts and discovers mom nirvana through embracing her canine side. The whole metaphor is pretty unsubtle, which seems to be a sticking point with some critics of this book. However, subtlety isn’t always necessary to an effective metaphor, and this one did the job for me.

Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch gets a 4 star rating from me. While I think the plot could have been meatier, I really really liked it as a work of great humor and emotional vulnerability. Any woman, and especially any mother, will be hard-pressed to not see herself somewhere in this modern fairytale.