Animal Instinct
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Books We Love 2025
One of Brooklyn Public Library’s Books We Love 2025
The world has stopped. But Rachel is just getting started…
It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation.
But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, the AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age . . . and some of the bad. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart’s content, she begins to realize she can’t reprogram her ex-husband, her children, her friends, or the roster of paramours that’s grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Shearn's delightful and hilarious latest (after Dear Edna Sloane), a recently divorced app developer and mother of three navigates online dating during the early months of Covid-19. Unwilling to remain stuck inside her spare Brooklyn apartment, Rachel meets men and women for take-out drinks in parks and breaks pandemic protocols by going home with them, awakening her dormant sexual desire in the process. She dubs her small group of regular dalliances "the team," and relates to the reader a series of wry and cutting observations about traditional marriage ("I've gone from being his best friend to becoming a butler / sex worker / armchair!"). Shearn transcends typical divorce novel tropes as Rachel begins work on a chatbot called Frankie that will ultimately become an amalgam of "the team," possessing all the desirable qualities of the people she dates with none of the downside or hassle of human relationships. Eventually, the bot teaches Rachel unexpected lessons about self-forgiveness and the rewards of embracing one's imperfections, leading her to connect with someone IRL. This scintillating story of reinvention will excite Shearn's fans and win new ones.
