Critics' Opinion:
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Published in USA
Mar 2017
287 pages
Genre: Novels
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
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Annie Hartnett was the 2013-2014 winner of the Writer in Residence Fellowship for the Associates of the Boston Public Library and has received awards and honors from the Bread Loaf School of English, McSweeney's, and Indiana Review. Hartnett received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Alabama, an MA from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, and currently teaches at Grub Street, an independent writing center in Boston. She lives with her husband and their beloved border collie in Providence, Rhode Island.
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