This balance, overall, adds a humorous matter-of-fact quality to Elvis’s narration.
This fifth-grade sense of wonder is done with an adept touch, so that the prose syncs up perfectly with the character’s age and emotional state while still maintaining stylistic maturity. Elvis is interested in everything from the hierarchal structure of naked mole rat communities to the eating habits of ill giraffes. Her frankness serves as a social crutch among her classmates and a social boon among adults who are swept away by her intellect.Įlvis’s indefatigable sense of intrigue, a trait she inherited from her mother, makes the more sentimental passages of Rabbit Cake all the more endearing, and allows Hartnett to seamlessly include a miscellany of animal factoids throughout Elvis’s telling of the story. In other words, she lacks the ability to self-edit. While possessing scientific curiosity and a gifted mind, she also demonstrates youthful honesty in situations that require nuanced emotional intelligence. Meanwhile, as each family member finds their own method of mourning, there are abundant cakes baked in a rabbit-shaped mold, a constant comfort that gives presence to their lost matriarch.įrom the get-go, Elvis Babbitt is a splendid narrator, one equally precocious and naïve. Babbitt takes to wearing Eva’s bathrobe and lipstick, and Elvis dives headfirst into her mother’s research on the sleeping habits of animals. In reaction to their mother’s death, Lizzie’s own hereditary sleepwalking habits gets increasingly dangerous, Mr. Lizzie has been deemed a problem child by every teacher with which she’s crossed paths, leaving Elvis often marred in her sister’s shadow. Babbitt owns a local carpeting empire passed down from his father.
The Babbitt family is well known around their small fictional hometown of Freedom, Alabama. Hence, Elvis, her older sister Lizzie, and her father are relatively unsurprised by Eva’s demise, but do carry immense emotional baggage for not finding a way to ultimately save her from her perilous nighttime habits. Foul play is not ruled out, but Eva was a notorious sleepwalker prone to swimming in her nocturnal state. Rabbit Cake, told from the perspective of Elvis Babbitt, an inquisitive ten-year-old girl with a passion for zoology, follows the Babbitt family in the months following the death of Elvis’ mother, Eva, who disappeared and was found weeks later drowned in the Chattahoochee River. Hartnett’s work is interested in classification to say the least, and offers genuine consideration of family dynamics that span the animal kingdom at large.
This is perhaps one thesis of Annie Hartnett’s ebullient Rabbit Cake, a novel loaded with dark humor and self-diagnosed moroseness, but also one that bursts forth with optimism at every turn. Ecosystems perpetually hang in delicate balance, as much with humans as any other species.
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