I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT HORSES AND SEX

Creatures, humans, caregiving and self-examination are tangled up perfectly in this sharply silly collection.

Hanawalt, the production designer for the popular animated comedy BoJack Horseman and creator of the adult animated series Tuca & Bertie, clearly has a deep connection with animals. In this book, echoing her previous cartoon work, she draws her own cartoon avatar as a bird-headed woman and her friends and acquaintances as cats, dogs, pigs, and fish. Beyond the emotional security of these quirky facades, Hanawalt has also come to her latest creative endeavor with a real, live, wet-nosed, wonderful animal on her mind. After years of indecision, the self-proclaimed, lifelong horse girl decides she’s ready to buy her own horse. And so, Juniper the Norwegian Fjord comes into her life. She fully embraces her new role as a horse owner, enjoying grooming, training, and trail-riding with Juni and navigates an equine health crisis that bonds the pair quite deeply. On a rough but effective parallel track, she struggles with the end of her long-term relationship and tries to rev herself up for dating and all that goes with it. But, as she’s reaching her 40s, the experience of singledom has a few new wrinkles as she tries to figure out how to treat herself kindly while she gets what she needs. She considers, quite cautiously, her long-held ambivalence about becoming a parent and details the medical and emotional ups and downs of egg retrieval. The flowing, unfettered, occasionally gross-out, briefly explicit facade of Hanawalt’s art style conceals the heart of a woman approaching midlife, working to figure out what’s meaningful and what’s superfluous, what to hold onto and what to laugh long and hard about.

A delightfully dirty mind and a cracked-open heart make for an intense, unpredictable, and rawly relatable ride.