Poor Deer [J0394]

2024 PB with minor wear. 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "One of the most heart wrenching stories I've ever read and yet I'd still read it again."; "Blending magical realism with literary fiction, Claire Oshetsky tells a fractured fable about deep grief, childhood trauma, guilt, loneliness, and the unraveling of a broken family. A quietly beautiful, deeply compassionate novel that asks difficult questions without insisting on easy answers. At its heart, it's about the stories we tell ourselves not to escape the truth, but to survive it."; "Oshetsky is a master of magical realism and unreliable narrators. The structure of this story was gripping, and Margaret's attempts to rewrite both her past and future broke my heart."