OPEN THROAT

A mountain lion ekes out a lonely existence below the Hollywood sign in this singular, stunning novel.

The narrator of Hoke’s fifth book (after the memoir Sticker) cannot share the name his mother gave him because “it’s not made of noises a person can make,” but it might be fair to refer to him as P-22. That puma, to whom the book is movingly dedicated, lived in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park from 2012 to 2022 and was the subject of much adoration and occasional concern. Driven from where he was born by a violent and territorial father, Hoke’s leonine protagonist is forced to brave the highway that he refers to as “the long death” to survive. That tenacious act strands him on the other side, however, and forces him to make a life defined by his proximity to humans rather than his fellow big cats. As he overhears hikers in conversation, recognizes a shared queerness with men having a covert tryst, and comes to care for the unhomed people camping in the park and an aspiring teenage witch, the mountain lion makes sense of who he is and finds an indelible place in readers’ hearts. Hoke’s prose is a joy, as it alternatingly charms with malapropisms (as when the cougar wonders what a “scare city mentality” is) and stuns with poetic simplicity (“a father to a kitten is an absence / a grown cat to a father is a threat”).

Compassionate, fierce, and bittersweet, this is an unforgettable love letter to the wild.