All too often, we humans think of ourselves as independent and separate from all other living creatures. But not Frankie Connor, the protagonist of Meredith Walters’ debut novel This Animal Body.
A first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley, Frankie meets a mysterious group of talking animals just as her program begins. Her field is neuroscience, which she chose in the hopes of discovering a cure for depression and anxiety that have plagued her most of her life. The animals claim to have an urgent message for her. The problem is, they’re not willing to share it. Not yet. Not until she’s ready.
While Frankie’s new friends may not have her highly evolved, state-of-the-art, exalted human brain, they do know things she doesn’t: poems, scientific facts, and what happened in the forgotten years before her adoption. Frankie can’t dismiss her conversations with these animals as mere dreams, but she also can’t accept them as real. To prove she’s still sane, she investigates her past and defies the professor who heads her lab to conduct a series of scientific experiments to test just how much animals are capable of communicating. Just when Frankie uncovers the truth, she has to make an impossible choice: betray the animals she’s fallen in love with or give up her dream of neuroscience, her last chance at success, and everything she thought she knew.
Touched with magical realism too real to deny, Meredith Walters’ debut This Animal Body brings to light the powerful ties between humans, wild animals, and nature, inviting readers to rediscover and heal through their relationship with the wider living world.
For as long as she can remember, Walters has wandered in forests looking for animals and magic and writing stories about what she found. Her life adventures have included volunteering for a nonprofit in Mexico, studying literature at UC Berkeley, getting an MBA, and working for a social enterprise startup. Her short story collection, The Adventures of Little One, was published in 2018. Today Walters lives in Atlanta, working as a life/career coach helping others rediscover their lost magic and once again writing stories about what she finds on her wanderings through the woods.
