LoveReading Says
A profound and uninhibited exploration of motherhood, cleverly captured, and wonderfully written.
Intertwining personal memoir with insights from evolutionary biology, zoology, and toxicology, Jukes delivers a real, and visceral account of motherhood from the first trimester to the birth and beyond. The want versus the fear of what is to come. The doubt that our bodies can produce another living being. Being a vessel as well as a membrane. At the mercy of the threats at large. Plunged into the preparation. The research. Keen to know, to understand, to not disappoint.
Impeccably researched, taking lessons from grey whales, frogs, sea slugs, insects, spiders, orangutans, meerkats and the Publilia treehopper, Jukes shares how these stories helped her navigate pregnancy and early motherhood. How childbirth puts you more in touch with your animal side. Your creature self. Becoming more intuitive, primitive.
As Jukes navigates the early stages of life with her newborn, she delves into stories from the natural world, using them as companions and guides to examine where her own animality begins and ends. It's so raw, so real, with no filter, and definitely no rose coloured spectacles here. But it's an absolutely fascinating account of motherhood across the animal kingdom with weird and wonderful stories of animal parents and how we compare. The book tells stories of communities of care and challenges traditional gender roles as in the wider animal kingdom, parenting happens all ways. It's about how we adapt, evolve and survive in the future. Unlike anything I've ever read it is empowering, passionate and beautifully written and really gets to the heart of what being a mother is all about.
Deborah Maclaren
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Mother Animal Synopsis
MOTHER ANIMAL: A STARTLINGLY NEW VISION OF MOTHERHOOD from the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings
When Helen Jukes falls pregnant, she does what anyone else would do. She searches for information to help make sense of the changes underway inside her. But as the months pass and her body becomes increasingly strange,?the pregnancy guides seem insufficient; even the advice of her friends feels oppressive.
So she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. Here she begins a process of wilder enquiry, in which stories of spiders, polar bears, bonobos and burying beetles (among others) begin to unsettle and expand her notion of what mothering is; what it could be.
As she enters the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with a newborn, these animal stories become Helen’s companions and guides. They allow her to explore where her own animality begins and ends and how the polluted stuff of human industry has come to influence life, even from its very beginnings.
A passionate, visceral and intimate account of a body changed, Mother Animal combines personal memoir with fresh insights from evolutionary biology, zoology and toxicology to ask the big questions that lie at the heart of what it means to be alive – and a mother – today.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781783968381 |
| Publication date: |
27th February 2025 |
| Author: |
Helen Jukes |
| Publisher: |
Elliott & Thompson |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
224 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Biographies & Autobiographies
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| Other Genres: |
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About Helen Jukes
HELEN JUKES is the author of the acclaimed memoir A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings, a Book of the Year in BBC Countryfile, Glamour UK and Slate and a London Review of Books Book of the Week. It was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Non-Fiction Award. Jukes' writing has appeared in The New York Times, Port Magazine, Aeon, The Clearing, Caught by the River, among others. Her forthcoming book, Mother, Animal, has been awarded grant funding by Arts Council England. She currently teaches on the Creative Writing programme at the University of Oxford, and is a guest lecturer at the University of Nottingham. She lives on the edge of the Peak District with her daughter.
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