We first meet Lucy, the bright (but sometimes misguided) narrator of Emeline Atwood’s debut novel A Real Animal, dangerously high up in the branches of an oak tree on her New England college campus. Naked, snarling, and fully convinced that she is a leopard, Lucy draws a crowd, evading all rescue attempts over the next few hours. It is only after she sees her mother rising up to the treetop on the lift of a cherry picker that Lucy finally comes to, “suddenly feeling extremely unbalanced and very high up.” Ignoring the advice of first responders and university personnel, Lucy and her mother end up in a silent car ride bound not for the hospital, but for Lucy’s childhood home, where the “leopard incident” is rarely, if ever, spoken of again.
Rendered in forty pages of rich but effortless prose, the first chapter—aptly titled “Emergency Services”—is about as shocking and vivid as they come, setting an energetic pace for the novel that Atwood largely sustains throughout. But perhaps even more impressive than Atwood’s ability to hook readers is how clearly the beginning of A Real Animal outlines the novel’s scope and focus on love and violence, nature and instinct, selfhood and family: “I know something now about fear that’s not quite human,” Lucy narrates near the end of the chapter, explaining how her experience as the leopard still lingers in her memory. “About predation that’s different from what others might think they know, about why cats like lying out in the sun so much.” These themes continue to develop and resonate over the next three hundred pages, ultimately offering a beautiful and unflinching look into pain, healing, human nature, and what it means to be a person.
Structured around Lucy’s romantic relationships, A Real Animal is a sprawling character study and psychological portrait of a young woman searching for her sense of self. Lucy recounts three relationships from her twenties in powerfully illustrative episodes, spanning temporally from the “leopard incident” to the fictive present roughly a decade later when she sits down to write her story. Over the years, Lucy spends time living in Boston, Indianapolis, and Austin; she dates Cole, the college sweetheart, Ellis, an impulsive man prone to violent outbursts, and Liam, a down-to-earth woodworker; she visits her sister in New York City, learns to scuba dive, tricks her parents into taking a barefoot hike. In many instances, Lucy also finds herself revisiting harrowing situations from her past, including, most notably, an incredibly violent sexual assault.
And while there are certainly overarching plot lines that connect these discrete chapters in Lucy’s life, A Real Animal is mostly organized in a thematic sense rather than a strictly chronological one. To Atwood’s credit, readers will have no trouble following Lucy’s movement in and out of memory, despite the story’s impressively complex timelines. It is Lucy’s consistently recognizable voice that seems to bring all of the story’s threads together. Sharp, memorable, and wrought with a kind of stark honesty that makes for an instantly compelling character, the novel’s subsequent chapters grant readers the time and space to witness the ways in which Lucy’s experiences, desires, and choices impact and shape her worldview over the long term.
Admittedly, the novel’s focus on romantic love results in less page space for Atwood to explore Lucy’s platonic relationships to their full extent. Although, this is perhaps partly by design, and maybe even Atwood’s point. As Lucy ages, she finds herself more and more at peace with her own company in a way that feels particularly authentic to the experience of young women navigating the complex demands of sexuality and gender. Lucy’s relationship with her older sister, Patty, also provides a nice foil to her tumultuous romantic life; quiet, thoughtful, and deliberate, Patty keeps Lucy connected to her family and her past, and Atwood’s portrayal of the sometimes-fraught but unconditional love between sisters is particularly impactful.
At its core, A Real Animal challenges our understanding of nature of all kinds, be it human, animal, or somewhere in between. In a way that feels both honest to the story and true of life itself, Atwood deftly avoids neatly tied-off endings or overly-simplified conclusions in favor of a quieter, more character-driven kind of close. Ultimately, A Real Animal’s most salient and impactful narrative arc is formed out of Lucy’s growing capacity for self-reflection, which continues to develop beautifully through the final pages of this magnificent debut.
FICTION
by Emeline Atwood
Catapult
Published on July 7, 2026
