With Teeth

April 1, 2021
A lesbian couple raises a son with a disconcerting dark side. Sammie and Monika are a gay Central Florida couple: Monika is a successful lawyer, and Sammie works part time from home as a copy editor so she can be there for their son, Samson. Even from toddlerhood, Samson is an inscrutable child. At 4, he calmly allows himself to be nearly abducted by a man on a playground; as a fourth grader he carries around a doll double of himself that Sammie helped him make for a school project. And Sammie is ill at ease in her mom role: She sees herself as "a former manager now reduced to running a household. And...not even running it all that well." When Monika calls Sammie one night from the ER claiming that Samson has bitten another child, Sammie must confront the fundamental terror she feels in the face of parenting her son: "Maybe love is always a thing," she thinks, "that's resting on the edge of violence." As Samson grows, his behavior pushes over that edge, and Sammie must confront her own destructive impulses and the role she plays in her son's, and her family's, unravelling. Arnett writes movingly of the loneliness Sammie feels in the queer community once she becomes a parent, at times even flashing outside of Sammie's point of view for brief interludes to show how outsiders see her in ways that she cannot clearly see herself. As in her first novel, Mostly Dead Things (2019), Arnett deftly examines the psychological dynamics of a family, raising complicated questions about whether mothers can ever truly understand how to raise sons and whether our children, too often, are mirrors of our own worst tendencies. A novel that is not afraid to look at the underbelly of parenting, queer relationships, and middle age.

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April 26, 2021
Arnett (Mostly Dead Things) paints a complex picture of a queer family in this well-sculpted drama. Protagonist Sammie and her wife, Monika, have a son, Samson, who proves to be an ornery and enigmatic child. (Among other things, he willfully lets a strange man attempt to abduct him at the age of four and later carries a school project doll of himself everywhere.) Sammie is the more anxious and hands-on of the parents; she works part-time as a copy editor, while laid-back Monika excels as a lawyer. In addition to doubting her fitness as a parent, Sammie misses the social life she had pre-Samson and “didn’t like the way other women looked at her wife, didn’t like the fact that no one looked at her that way anymore.” By the time Samson’s 16, he has become a skilled swimmer and retains much of his inscrutable personality, Sammie and Monika have separated, and Sammie struggles with dating. Arnett’s prismlike prose is supplemented by vignettes focused on peripheral characters, such as Samson’s teachers, which add some maximalist flair to the domestic story. With its vividly rendered characters, this offers an intense rendition of a modern family. Agent: Serene Hakim, Ayesha Pande Literary.

May 1, 2021
Arnett (Mostly Dead Things, 2019) continues to create needed space for a genre one might call "queer unromance." As before, Arnett remains deeply interested in muggy Florida nights, the uncomfortable and the repulsive, and people getting it wrong. Sammie, mother to anti-social Samson and wife to power-player Monika, makes one cringeworthy decision after another, including biting back--with teeth--when her son bites her. Their mutual scars mark them early as the family navigates years of failure and difficulty. Sammie's profound imperfection will be a source of relief to queer parents everywhere; her bond with her son is complicated and fraught. In the opening scene, Sammie saves her son from a possible playground abduction, yet she ends up on the ground bleeding as Samson pours dirt on her. The novel's crescendo bends toward questions of plot (what is actually happening here) when the existential questions are more compelling (what is life for a not-young queer woman struggling in parenthood). Even so, this book is equal parts Florida queer and fascinating.

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