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.
Annie Hartnett is the award-winning author of three novels and two others works. Her Unlikely Animals won the Julia Ward Howe Prize for fiction and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Rabbit Cake, a finalist for the New England Book Award, was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Associates of the Boston Public Library. Along with writer Tessa Fontaine, she co-runs the Accountability Workshops for writers, helping them commit to routines and embrace the long, slow, joyful, terrible process of doing the work.View all by Annie Hartnett
