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Rabbit Cake Audiobook
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Publisher Description
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.
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“Narrator Katie Shore’s youthful voice perfectly portrays Elvis Babbitt…Shore creates a tone of innocence and authenticity. She highlights Elvis’ humor and honesty by using emphasis and a clear timbre. When expressing Elvis’ feelings about her mother’s death, Shore’s words are soft-spoken and childlike… This is a story about family, overcoming loss, and keeping your sense of humor through it all.”
— AudioFile
Quotes
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“[A] treasure. Books about grief are rarely funny and adorable―this one is.”
— People magazine -
“Funny and heartfelt, Rabbit Cake manages adult questions with a tween’s sense of wonder.”
— Marie Claire -
“Irresistible…[a] quirkily funny coming-of-age tale.”
— Seattle Times -
“Darkly funny and soulful…Rabbit Cake is Elvis’s unpredictable story of healing, and the young woman at its center is immediately lovable because she is delightfully human.”
— Boston Globe -
“Darkly funny and endlessly smart, Rabbit Cake chases down the quivering heart of familial loss and reminds us there is no right way to grieve.”
— Ploughshares (A Must-Read selection for 2017) -
“Brilliant…The moving and often funny story of a family trying to figure out what to do next now that their touchstone is gone…Charming and beautifully written.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“Elvis is on my shortlist for the most charming narrator ever and the spunk and depth of her voice make her immediately lovable and memorable. But so, too, are her father, his bird, her older sister, the older sister’s friend who comes to live with them, and Boomer the border collie who didn’t just make the shortlist for best fictive dog ever but is walking away in the sash and tiara right now.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“Hartnett adeptly conveys a full picture of this family’s emotional turmoil, tinged with the sincere hope of a child and the rising anxiety of an adolescent.”
— School Library Journal -
“A truly terrific and original novel about grief, family, and finding hope in the aftermath.”
— Booklist -
“Fantastically original, a story about loss that expands in such exciting, unpredictable ways that I found myself completely won over by the unique Babbitt clan. Hartnett has such a gift for absurdity without ever losing the essential heart of the story. With this novel, she’s become one of my favorite writers.”
— Kevin Wilson, author of Perfect Little World -
“Heartbreak and dark comedy fuse together in this endearing story of family dysfunction and loss.”
— Beth Hoffman, author of Looking for Me -
“A quirky, slightly magical coming-of-age story that will have your heart.”
— Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Awards
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An Indie Next List Pick for March 2017
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An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2017
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A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
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A School Library Journal Top Pick of Adult Books for Teens
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Nominee for the New England Book Award
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Chicago Review of Books Pick of Best of the Year So Far
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People Pick of the Week
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One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2017
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About Annie Hartnett
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.
About Katie Schorr
Katie Schorr is an actor and writer in New York. Her one-woman show, Take Me. Seriously, ran for six months at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and she performs throughout New York in new works at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and Ars Nova, among other theaters. She has appeared on VH1’s Best Week Ever and costars in the web series Head in the Oven with Saturday Night Live actor Bill Hader. Her audiobook credits include narrating the novels in Alyson Noel’s bestselling Immortals series. Of her work on the series, AudioFile magazine has said, “Narrator Katie Schorr has a wonderfully raspy, youthful voice, which she puts to good effect on the cast of teenage characters.”