In the haunting, three-paragraph prologue that opens Sara Maurer's A Good Animal (St. Martin's Press; 288 pages), an adult Everett Lindt walks the fields of his family's farm in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He reflects on a brief romance buried deep in his past, reminiscing about "that cold May night, when Mary stared out my truck window, far away and unreachable." Following the allusion to the relationship's chilling endpoint, A Good Animal flashes back to 1995 and details the nine months that comprised Everett and Mary's relationship, capturing the sheer recklessness of two teenagers experiencing love and tragedy for the first time.
Seventeen-year-old Everett envisions a simple future himself: settling down on his family's sheep farm and starting his own flock. But on the cusp of senior year, Everett's domineering friend Charlie pushes them both to accomplish the typical masculine goals of teenage boys. "I bet she'll make senior year a little more fun," Charlie says about Kylie, the daughter of a local farmer who hires the boys to work in his fields. During one such workday, Kylie brings the pair lunch, with new-in-town Mary by her side. Everett is immediately smitten, noting, "She was small and skinny, not like most of the girls around here, who were wide-hipped and hearty; cornfed, like Kylie, who filled out a pair of jeans real nice." After a rocky beginning, Everett and Mary begin a relationship that eventually shapes their future lives.
Initially, the two appear as archetypes of a traditional teenage struggle, particularly common in rural areas. Everett wants to stay in his hometown; Mary wants to go somewhere far away. Thinking his future is already established, Everett feels apathetic toward his education; Mary views the classroom as an essential step to eventually attending art school. "I can't imagine being in one place so long," Mary tells him when they initially meet, to which Everett replies, "I can't imagine not."
Presenting the two characters' initial desires in such basic, opposing worldviews risks painting them with too broad of a brushstroke, but Maurer develops them into full, complicated teenagers. Neither has their future figured out to the degree that they think, and the introduction of sex to relationship further exemplifies how each struggles to deal with impending adulthood. Their situation likely feels familiar to anyone who experienced first love at a similar age, but Maurer is able to add an appropriate level of nuance to prevent their relationship from reading as tired or trite.
Everett acts as the novel's sole narrator, so such nuance is only interpreted through his point of view. Mary never wavers from her stated desire to move on to a better life somewhere else, but Everett interprets her wishes as a failure to understand his world. He thinks by incorporating Mary into his own life—inviting her over to meet his flock of sheep, introducing her to his mother—she'll understand his vision. But Mary's continued resistance to his dream causes Everett's decision-making to falter, and he begins acting irrationally. Maurer leverages the limited narration to force the reader to interpret the cracks in his behavior that he won't spell out himself. He acknowledges, at one point, "I wasn't as dumb as I'd like to tell myself. I knew everything from the start. I walked into it eyes wide open and kept right on going. She'd tipped her hand the first day I met her: 'Far away from here.'" But Everett's own actions betray his stated self-awareness. He makes a series of reckless decisions, explaining each as a one-off, that the reader can easily interpret as a boy trying to do whatever he can to hold on to a relationship that doesn't have a long-term future, and subsequently leading both himself and Mary into a tragic situation.
Maurer stretches her legs with the plot, working at a deliberate pace while she explores not just the developing relationship between Everett and Mary, but also the meticulous details and experiences of a teenage sheep farmer. From raising and showing sheep at the county fair, to burying a dead ewe following a coyote attack, to an awkward sexual encounter with the Fair Queen, the pace sometimes gets bogged down in minutia. But Maurer is able to recover and build momentum toward an eventual endpoint that she appropriately telegraphs but doesn't entirely give away.
A Good Animal is a snapshot of a young couple's struggles with love and adulthood at a particular time set in a vibrant, detailed place. The novel teems with figurative language involving animals, including an extended metaphor about the destruction of a teenager's ideal dreams for his future. But the story's heartbeat rises and falls with Everett and Mary's relationship, and it's likely to resonate with anyone who possesses a similar visceral memory of the intensity and recklessness of a rocky first love.
