Excerpt from Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You're going to live in the palace," Emma told Moses, even if that was not exactly how she felt about her childhood home, but her parents' house was definitely a good place to be a dog. Her mother's last rescue dog had died that summer, cancer, and she had recently said that she had "a dog-shaped hole in her heart," even though her husband was also dying.

Moses went to swipe the side of Emma's cheek with his tongue, and a drool loogie fell from his jowls and stuck to Emma's sweater, which was extremely gross, but Emma's heart warmed. "Good boy," she said. Friend, Moses was thinking at that moment. We liked that about dogs, we always had, how clearly they can show a person exactly what they're thinking. We spend most of our time focused on the thoughts of the human beings of our town, but sometimes it's good to be absorbed in the thoughts of a dog.

Emma drove past the sign advertising snowmobile rentals: kids under five ride free! So many people don't know how redneck New Hampshire really is, Emma thought, which hurt our feelings a little. We had hoped she would be glad to be back after so much time away. We'd hoped that once she'd seen the traffic of Los Angeles, she could have appreciated our town's charm. Because Everton is really a nice place to live, or it was for us.

Other than the enormous private hunting park, Everton is more or less a normal New Hampshire town. There are pine trees and winding roads and blue-green mountains. Sugar River snakes through the town, dotted with covered bridges, and the water is clean enough to swim and fish in. We're particularly proud of Maple Street Cemetery, which is surrounded by a neat stone wall, with a large iron gate, and is very well maintained by our groundskeeper, the one-handed Mr. Ridley Willett, an army vet. It's really a town no different from any other, a place where people live and people die.

But maybe, now that Emma Starling was coming back to Everton, things could be different. Just this once, maybe someone would cheat death, edge the Grim Reaper out by a nose. We weren't naïve at Maple Street; we knew about the limits of Emma's abilities from her years of adolescent healing attempts, her days sitting in the sticky red booth at the McDonald's with Crystal Nash, the girls charging forty-five dollars cash for a half hour of real-deal teenage healing. Crystal was the business manager, the entire operation had been her idea. Crystal used to insist that with Emma's power she could be like Jesus. But Emma wasn't exactly Jesus. Emma had trouble getting close to people, and Jesus, well, that dude was charismatic. Jesus must have been a helluva guy; not many people can say they came back from the dead. The rest of us stay here when we go.

But Emma didn't have to be Jesus; you don't have to be Jesus to want to save your dad from what's killing him. And at least by now, the time of her return to Everton, Emma was older, more mature. The Charm should have grown stronger, so maybe she could really heal her father, extend his lifeline by a little. We didn't want Clive to live forever, we just wanted a little more time tacked on at the end. Extra time would mean something, for anyone, and especially for a man like Clive, who still had some things to work out with his family.

"Don't hold your breath for a miracle," Charles Tepper (b. 1932–d. 1998) said from his seat on his grave, since he didn't believe Clive's condition was curable. A bunch of us laughed, funny since none of us breathe anyway.

"What about mothers who lift cars off babies?" Mae Belle Henick (b. 1799–d. 1820) argued from her headstone. "Anything could happen, Charles, you know that." Mae Belle had died before the invention of the automobile, but at Maple Street we stay up on current events.

As Emma got closer to her parents' house, more and more of the trees along the road were littered with white flyers staple-gunned to the trunks. Maybe Emma needed her eyes examined, because from the driver's seat, she could only make out the word "missing" at the top. Emma figured it was a missing pet, or a stolen car, or a tractor or snowblower gone missing from a garage. Emma wasn't at all concerned about the flyers, which disappointed us. We thought since she'd stopped for the stray dog on the side of the road, she'd stop to see what those posters were all about, and she would learn what her parents hadn't been telling her.

Excerpted from Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett. Copyright © 2022 by Annie Hartnett. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.