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The Thread's Must-Read
"Rabbit Cake"by Annie Hartnett
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This is the first book I've fallen in page-over-bookmark in love with this year — and it's all about the narrator.
“Rabbit Cake” a is weird, dark, grab-your-heart story of a family clawing its way out of grief. It’s narrated by 11-year-old Elvis Babbitt, whose life is upturned when her sleepwalking, sleep-swimming mother drowns in the river running through Freedom, Ala.
The school counselor tells Elvis that grief is a process. She even draws her a calendar: She’s supposed to feel better in 18 months. But that 18 months stretches on in one long emotional disaster, as her father starts wandering around the house in her mother’s old bathrobe, and her older sister — also a sleepwalker — takes to devouring everything in the fridge while unconscious. Elvis becomes convinced that there’s more to her mother’s death than drowning, and buries herself in the investigation.
Hartnett isn’t afraid to go weird — weird like parrots that use the voices of the dead, weird like a Guinness World Record for cake baking, weird like delving into the sleep habits of giraffes. The book is an unpredictable ride through the darkest moments in life.
Read it for the narrator alone, if the voice catches you: Elvis is one of my favorite characters in years. She feels like a mix of Scout Finch and Harriet the Spy, pushed to the edge by loneliness and an obsession with animals.
Embrace the quirk.
-Tracy Mumford
P.S. Tell us what you're reading on Twitter @TheThreadMPR.
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