Review: The Breeding Season

The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I think, if I actually understood appreciated literary fiction, this would have been a slightly higher rating. But I don't. Why does lit fic always involve making up new words and abandoning proper grammar and formatting? Why is that considered 'clever'?

Add to that, the story was weird and confusing for 3/4 of the book, and it's only the final quarter where things actually get kind of interesting and suddenly there's a decent story to get caught up in.

So, here's the deal: Elise and Dan have lost a child. The grief sees them dealing very differently - Elise throws herself into her weird science work that involves sussing the messed up breeding behaviours of some kind of rodent/marsupial (I think?) that I've never heard of before, while Dan gets caught up in the kinky art of his uncle, about whom he has been tasked to write.

Firstly, it's super confusing. It drifts straight from symbolism or simile into action without pause, so it's hard to work out what is memory, what is analogy, and what is actually happening for real. I don't know how much of what I think happened actually happened. Elise's animal fixations were also kind of confusing and I realise there was supposed be a lot of crafty, intelligent symbolism there somewhere but mostly it was a headache to work out what the point was.

Adding to the confusion of Elise's scientific studies is the art studies of Dan. He's focused on the art of his uncle, which is basically all female anatomy. There is a lot of mention of vulvas in this book, and a ridiculous focus on sex. I knew that 'breeding' would be a consideration of this novel, but it's more like an obsession, and I still didn't quite understand how it was all trying to connect. Not a book for the more conservative folk, I'm afraid.

There was just so much of this novel that I didn't get. As such, there was no warmth to it for me, there was no sympathy or any real emotion at all. I spent so much of this novel getting caught up on all the made-up words that it read more like nonsense than clever literature.

I wanted to feel more for Elise and Dan than I did, but they came across as such space cadets that I just wanted to slap them. I never really felt their grief or their pain. I certainly became more invested towards the end, but it still never grabbed my emotions.

I do think there was a story here that had potential. But it was trying so hard to be clever and unique and symbolic that it ended up making me feel more amused at its pretentiousness. I wish it had just been written plainly, with less 'cleverness' and more heart.

Likely to be loved by people who enjoy untangling symbolism, but the writing absolutely ruined this one for me.

With thanks to A&U for an ARC

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