Rabbit moon A novel

It is early Sunday morning in Shanghai's deserted financial district when a car careens around the corner and strikes Lindsey Litvak. The hit-and-run leaves the 22-year-old in a coma and her family searching for answers. Why was she living hundreds of miles from Beijing, where she told them she was teaching English? Why is the closet in her sparse apartment filled with designer dresses and high heels? As Lindsey's divorced parents seek information and her 11-year-old sister, away at summer camp, awaits word from the hospital, layers of family history are revealed in this engrossing novel. Before Lindsey dropped out of college and moved to China, where the Litvaks had gone to adopt her sister years earlier, she had a teenage affair with a married man. That relationship and its sudden end are at the core of the secrets threatening to tear this family apart. Capturing both the possibilities of reinvention and the scars carried from a traumatic past, Haigh's (Mercy Street, 2022) searing novel examines the interplay between choice and chance.

A young American woman in Shanghai ends up in a coma after a hit-and-run in Haigh's engrossing latest (after Mercy Street). Lindsey Litvak, 22, is supposed to be teaching English in Beijing, as her mother, Claire, insists to an agent from the U.S. Consulate who calls Claire with the news of Lindsey's accident. Unbeknownst to Lindsey's parents and adopted younger sister, Grace, who was born in China, Lindsey has been moonlighting as an escort. Claire and Lindsey's father, Aaron, who are divorced, fly to China from their homes in the American Northeast, leaving Grace at summer camp without telling her what happened to Lindsey. Upon the pair's arrival in Shanghai, they are unable to speak the language or communicate with Lindsey's doctor, and just barely able to navigate the city, a "veritable sea of people." As Lindsey's coma continues, Haigh alternates between the parents' perspectives, revealing how their old pattern of bickering returns now that they're forced to rely on each other. A final section from Grace's perspective ties up loose ends a bit too conveniently, but for the most part, Haigh keeps this family drama firing on all cylinders, and she succeeds at capturing Shanghai's dizzying effect on her characters. Readers will be transported. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Apr.)

Haigh's latest novel begins with a hit-and-run in Shanghai and ends with a Christmas wedding in Boston, and in between those events, a family is rattled, upended, and--maybe?--healed. The accident victim is 22-year-old Lindsey Litvak, who left college to travel to China with her boyfriend, their plan to teach English and immerse themselves in the culture. The boyfriend returned home, but Lindsey remained. When her divorced parents, Claire and Aaron, get the call that their daughter has been seriously injured, they fly to Shanghai to try to piece together what happened and will her back to health. Meanwhile, Lindsey's 11-year-old sister, Grace--adopted by Claire and Aaron as an infant from China--weathers the storm at her summer camp, wondering why Lindsey hasn't responded to her texts, unaware of her parents' anguish. As Claire and Aaron battle hospital bureaucracy, a language barrier, and their own guilt and fear, Haigh revisits the events that put Lindsey on that dark, late-night street and reveals the rift between parents and daughter that kept Lindsey on the other side of the world. Haigh draws a strong character sketch of Grace, who slowly awakens to the ramifications of her Chinese background. Lindsey feels less fully formed, her actions contradictory. What happens to her in Shanghai is predictable, and yet her youthful naïveté about matters of the heart and the darker side of human nature seem at odds with the ease with which she embraces her new life. Haigh's message here, beyond highlighting the pain of family estrangement, is perplexing. "We live at the intersection of causality and chance," an older Grace muses at the novel's end, a conclusion too superficial to leave much of an impression. A novel about family estrangement that relies too often on the obvious. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.