Sarah Gerard's The Butter House follows a woman who moves from a New York apartment to a Florida bungalow with her boyfriend. As she adapts to her new surroundings, the narrator navigates contradictory landscapes of love and possession, nature and built-environment, empathy and sympathy. She undergoes the arduous task of introducing two cats to the house and each other, while also becoming a surrogate caretaker for the neighborhood's feral cat colony. She grows a garden. She interrogates what it means to care for someone or something. Laced within these tender scenes, The Butter House chooses deliberate moments to scratch and bite with the ferocity of a territorial alley cat.