Poor Deer
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE KAFKA PRIZE FOR FICTION
A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky
Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.
No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.
Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.
Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When an innocent game goes awry, one young girl is left dead and the other doomed to a fantastical haunting in the restrained and unsettling latest from Oshetsky (Chouette). The survivor, Margaret, now a teen, writes her confession several years later while holed up in a motel room near Niagara Falls. "I've been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical," she writes, revealing that she accidentally locked her friend Agnes in a cooler in their Maine hometown. Ever since Agnes's death, Margaret has been haunted by Poor Deer, a devilish figment of her imagination with "mossy yellow nubs" for teeth, who seems determined to remind her of her sins. In chapters alternating between Margaret's confession and omniscient sketches of her past, what unfolds is a fascinating and often painful tale of a tortured childhood. A child whose strangeness can be taken as innocent or sinister, she is raised by her aunt and a mother resentful of her "little changeling" daughter. Her only friend is an old man in the woods who trains messenger pigeons, and she writes tales in a cypher intelligible only to herself. Oshetky handles Margaret's monstrous manifestation with a delicate touch and infuses her daily life with a muted eerieness. Readers will be captivated by Margaret's beautifully weird search for atonement.
