Deliver Me

A Novel

By: Elle Nash

Narrated by: Madeleine Dauer

Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.

The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish.

With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother's and boyfriend's newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival.

Contains mature themes.

©2023 Elle Nash (P)2024 Tantor

Poor hygiene with a heavy dose of religious trauma

I once read someone describe this story as feeling unhygienic and honestly I couldn't agree more. you can almost feel the grime caked onto each sentence.

Trigger Warnings before reading!

Animal Abuse
Animal Death (murder of a kitten and a dog)
Descriptions of murder and violence
Bug Fetish
Tampon Sucking

But despite how gross it was I would say that overall it was pretty bland. Daisy's main character trait is that she wants to have a baby no matter the cost and years of religious trauma have lead to her putting up with being treated like garbage for years at the hands of everyone around her. There are no truly "good" people in this story, but it does make you sympathize with Daisy providing readers with dual POV's of the past and present. From Daisy's strict religious upbringing to her current day paranoia and delusion. she's a character that you learn to both love and hate, making you wish she'd cut off everyone in her life and seek help for herself. her relationship with Sloan was incredibly frustrating, since Daisy makes it a point to describe Sloan as a beautiful, charismatic, philosophical temptress that ruined her childhood but then we aren't really shown much of Sloan's good traits that makes everyone so drawn to her. It left me wondering why it was that while Sloan was described as very gothic and had a darker sense of fashion somehow Daisy's strict, conservative, religious mother had no problem taking her in and pampering her and treating her even in adulthood as the paragon of all things good and holy that Daisy should strive to be.

The symbolism in this book can be really on the nose with it mainly coming from comparing pregnancy and giving birth to religion and the chickens Daisy cuts up and debones at her workplace. It gets to the point where it can feel overdone and repetitive and I think it would benefit from cutting some of it out. As for the bug fetish it honestly feels like it was just there to be gross and nothing else, like, there's all this talk of religion and pregnancy and suddenly there's just bugs in the mix. With her boyfriend Daddy being an exotic bug breeder and smuggler it feels so out of place that it left me wondering why it was included at all.

The ending, while graphic, wasn't anything new or surprising and feels like it was an attempt to somehow bring this all back to the chicken factory if only just so that readers can think "it all came back full circle"when really it could have happened anywhere and the outcome would have been the same.

If you like southern horror, Ethel Cain, and books about characters with religious trauma I'd say you should give it a read if you have the time and don't mind being a little grossed out.