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.

Praise for Rabbit Cake:

A Best Book of 2017 at Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, The Chicago Review of Books, Minnesota Public Radio, HelloGiggles, and more.

Selected as an Indies Introduce and Indie Next Pick, a People Magazine Book of the Week, an Amazon Best Book of the Month: Literature & Fiction, finalist for the New England Book Award, long-listed for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and shortlisted for The Crook's Corner Book Prize for Best Debut set in the South. 

“Annie Hartnett's Rabbit Cake is 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, New York Times bestselling author of The Family Fang

“A brilliant book . . . How a whip-smart young girl handles the loss of her mother and the reorientation of her family; charming and beautifully written.” - Kirkus, ★Starred Review★

“In Hartnett’s winning debut, a memorable young narrator’s desire for rationality wrestles with her grief. . . . Affecting.” -- Publishers Weekly, ★Starred Review★

"In this whimsical and utterly original debut...this is one family that veers towards the depths but is finally, joyously redeemed." -- Library Journal, ★Starred Review★

"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." -- The Boston Globe 

Where to find RABBIT CAKE? 

From your local bookstore or by using Indie Bound, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon