Animal Instinct By Amy Shearn

Fleishman Is in Trouble meets Big Swiss in this darkly humorous and tantalizing pandemic-ridden portrait of sex, divorce, and midlife, about a Brooklynite who frankensteins the perfect lover, from the critically acclaimed author of Unseen City.

It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein, mother of three, recent divorcee, and Brooklynite is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park bench dates with younger men, ongoing flirtations with beautiful women, and finally, actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation.

But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, the AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age . . . and some of the bad. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart’s content, she begins to realize she can’t reprogram her ex-husband, or her children, or her friends, or the roster of paramours that’s grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself.

Animal Instinct is at once a provocative tale of one woman’s burgeoning freedom, an indictment and celebration of our fraught relationship with technology, and a snapshot of life at its most fragile and most precious.