Mrs. Caliban

This one made my lunches at a terrible job the best time of the day.

Not my cup of tea. Funny how this story keeps reappearing, though. And either The Pisces or The Shape of Water (movie) tells the story more engagingly, in my opinion.

Absolutely fascinating and impossible to put down. I found this on a New York Times list of short books you can read in a day and thought I would try it just for fun; one of its main characters is a reptile-man, after all. Instead I found a perfect little novel. I’ve been down a rabbit hole since reading about Ingalls, who has remained relatively unknown but has had a small but loyal following that has included John Updike. It’s hard to believe her stuff hasn’t seen a much broader audience. This one is easy to recommend to others.

I was kindly sent this in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley I didn't know the woman would end up having sex with the frog-man and that is all on me because once again I didn't read the full synopsis and just thought the man and the woman would have a conversation in her kitchen. I liked the language and I think the premise is interesting but I find its contents deeply disturbing. I enjoyed the parts where the monster was not involved. The characters were not really likable and they were kind of irritating, and it ended up taking longer than necessary to read. I really enjoyed the surrealist feelings from the beginning, and not knowing if what she was hearing on the radio was real or not, but the middle part and coexisting with the monster felt tedious

A fascinating story of a lonely housewife ground down by a failing marriage and a terrible loss. Dorothy starts to hear voices through the radio but strange story of an amphibian creature escaped from a nearby research lab is all too real, and he turns up at her door for looking for food. Dorothy takes him in, this 8ft frog-man and names him Larry. Larry has suffered terribly in captivity, ensuring cruel experiments and torture by scientists who see him as a monster and am animal and as he and Dorothy begin to communicate they help to heal reach others wounds. Their relationship is powerful but so ordinary that it is sometimes possible to forget that Larry isn't human, and that's the point as Ingalls invites us to consider what human means beyond a scientific designation and what humanity is. There's a dark streak to the tale that helps to ground it in reality despite its surrealism. What makes it so special is it's subtlety. Ingalls' spare, deceptively simple writing is a brilliant juxtaposition to the outlandish plot and the surprisingly high body-count. There are lots of familiar theme, suburban boredom, female identity linked to home and husband, even monster movies but Ingalls gets to the heart of all of them as her two very different characters realise they are not do different after all and consider the world together. It's a little gem of a book.

[3.75]