Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2017
287 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Fans of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette and and Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You will delight in Annie Hartnett's debut, Rabbit Cake, a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother.
Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn't yet know - like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house.
Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother's death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.
"Starred Review. [A] winning debut...her story is affecting, exploring how a fragile but precocious girl strives to define herself after a tragedy." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Brilliant...How a whip-smart young girl handles the loss of her mother and the reorientation of her family; charming and beautifully written." - Kirkus
"Heartbreak and dark comedy fuse together in this endearing story of family dysfunction and loss." - Beth Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and Looking for Me
"Hartnett has written a quirky, slightly magical coming-of-age story that will have your heart. She is a writer to watch." - Heidi Durrow, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Fell From The Sky
This information about Rabbit Cake was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Merissa Conley
Annie Hartnett is the author of Rabbit Cake, which was listed as one of Kirkus Reviews's Best Books of 2017 and a finalist for the New England Book Award. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Associates of the Boston Public Library. She studied philosophy at Hamilton College, has an MA from Middlebury College, and an MFA from the University of Alabama. When she began writing Unlikely Animals, she was living in the groundskeeper's house in a cemetery. She now lives in a small town in Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and darling border collie, Mr. Willie Nelson.
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