This Animal Body

Frankie Conner, first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley, is finally getting her life together. After multiple failures and several false starts, she's found her calling: become a neuroscientist, discover the cause of her depression and anxiety, and hopefully find a cure for herself and everyone like her. But her first day of the program, Frankie meets a mysterious group of talking animals who 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. Hearing what they have to say, she 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 begins to investigate her past and defies the professor who heads her lab by conducting a series of scientific experiments to test just how much animals understand--and are capable of communicating. Just when Frankie uncovers the truth, one of her animal friends shows up in her lab severely injured, and she has to make what feels like an impossible decision: betray the beings she's fallen in love with or give up her dream of neuroscience, her last chance at success, and everything she thought she knew.