A Human as A Real Animal

In a brisk clip of straightforward prose, Emeline Atwood’s A Real Animal trots through the life of Lucy, interspersed by encounters with ferality. A solitary and often aloof figure, Atwood’s protagonist navigates a chilly relationship with her mother, a devastating sexual assault, and profound and mundane aftershocks at different stages of life. With haltingly realistic depictions, rebuking magical realism or the over-romanticization of human-animal connection, Atwood explores the instinctual drives of human nature. 

The so-called leopard incident opens the book, following Lucy as she scrambles up a tree on her college campus in a striking retreat into the animal mind. After the out-of-body experience, the nearly graduated senior finds a distance between herself and her university friends – a byproduct, she thinks, of their inability to address the situation and the instigating traumatic assault, but moreover a consequence of the dramatic shift in Lucy’s own perspective, which she identifies with the feline episode. Having looked, she feels, through the eyes of a great mammal, she can’t unsee her roommate, Frances, as “a fool for not knowing how she appeared to creatures other than herself.”

“I was desperate to know what I had looked like to them – how much of a leopard had I appeared to be?” Lucy wonders later, as she struggles to sink her teeth into the nature of the event and accept its fleeting impact.

The wonder of the experience stays with Lucy, but loses its urgency as she moves through different cities and relationships. A hypersexualized ferocity characterizes her liaison with a man in Indianapolis. Later, in Austin, the ineptitudes of a longtime boyfriend’s kindness catch up with her troubled past. The landscapes of both cities are starkly colored by the protagonist’s emotional state and social well-being.

Atwood captures the insolence of mid-20s confidence in Lucy’s at-times brash outbursts. “If your partner cheats, it’s close-minded to push or judge them,” she asserts uncompromisingly at a party in her sister’s New York apartment. As the character grows through these wince-inducing moments, the author also prods at the persistence of childhood dynamics through Lucy’s cyclical mother-daughter relationship. On a visit to her childhood home, she opens up unexpectedly, driving the pair into silence rather than bringing them together. “I don’t know why I’m saying this. This isn’t even what I wanted to talk about,” she tells her mother, desperately trying to backpedal to familiar ground. 

Readers watch Lucy’s lived experiences congeal into an imperfect worldview, a never-finalized set of fallacies and truths. Between glimpses of unremarkable everyday life, youthful insecurities and unresolved traumas harden into secrets and triggers. Often, the reason for her immediate emotional response seems to be a mystery to Lucy, just as much as it is for those around her. From a shaky perch inside her mind, readers draw their own empathetic connections between the protagonist’s sparse interiority and her actions. 

As Atwood leaps from one moment in Lucy’s life to another, she captures painfully relatable snippets of experience and frustrating disconnects candidly. Her characters express and encapsulate complex – at times unsavory – emotions in an unapologetic light that manages to hold deep understanding without offering excuses.

With the peculiar grace given to wild creatures, Atwood allows Lucy’s motives to remain muddled and unresolved, understandable yet inexplicable. The connection she makes between herself and the animal world serves as a tethering promise that not everything can be neatly explained and accounted for. Like all creatures of Earth, Lucy possesses a deep need for safety and security. She flounders between the immediacy of instinct and the need for measured planning in the moments that follow, like a cat stuck high in a tree.

This article appears in July 10 • 2026.