Deeply personal and emotional writing, typical of Jennifer Haigh.

I'll be recommending this one quite a bit. It's a middle of the road, family drama with a bit of international complexity.

The updated cover (blue with flowered branches) fits thematically with her previous cover designs but the original loose brushwork portrait was much more compelling. I typically associate that art style with modern literary fiction and gave this story a try thinking it might be a divergence from her others works. But it's still faithful to her voice and if the formula still works why scare away the usual readers with an overly hip cover.

I have a feeling this one will be popular, will probably be a big book club pick this year.

A broken family. An unbreakable bond of sisterhood...

Claire and Aaron Litvak are divorced parents of two daughters - Lindsey, 22, their natural daughter, and Grace, 11, adopted as an infant from China. Despite their age gap, the sisters are loving and devoted to each other. The parents are divided, angry, and bitter towards one another. This family is fractured.

Claire and Aaron are notified that Lindsey is in critical condition at a Shanghai hospital from a hit-and-run accident. They arrive separately and wait contentiously by Lindsey's bedside with questions...

"Rabbit Moon" is memorable, with much to digest for a relatively short novel. It feels heavy, dark, and sad; it has the heaviness of the unknown, the darkness of secrets and lies, and the sadness of unspoken regrets.

Haigh's writing is beautiful, evocative, and addictive, and I didn't want to put this book down or for it to end. I instinctively knew I would love this even before I started reading. I do have one teeny niggle: I wish it were a little longer to accommodate more of Grace's voice and her innate joy. Sharing this could have lightened the heftiness of this heartbreaking story.

This was an immersion read; the audiobook is narrated by Katharine Chin (Lindsey) and Yu-Li Alice Shen (Grace), who recounts the story flawlessly and delivers the perfect first-person voice for Lindsey and Grace. The result is an enjoyable listening experience.

"Rabbit Moon" is the first book I've read by Jennifer Haigh, and it will be one of my favorite reads for 2025!

4.75⭐

Thank you to Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Audio, and Jennifer Haigh for the gifted DRC and ALC through NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.

To be perfectly honest, I knew very little about 𝗥𝗔𝗕𝗕𝗜𝗧 𝗠𝗢𝗢𝗡 by Jennifer Haigh before I picked it up and I’m glad of that. I liked the way the layers of this strained family story unfolded with a lot of love that didn’t quite know where to go, and some mystery thrown in as well. For a relatively short book (288 pages) Haigh managed to cover a lot of ground.⁣
⁣
In broad strokes 𝘙𝘢𝘣𝘣𝘪𝘵 𝘔𝘰𝘰𝘯 is the story of a family recently shattered by divorce. They have two daughters. The younger, Grace, was adopted from China. The older, Lindsey, has had a rough go of it and left college to teach English in China. When parents Claire and Aaron get a call that Lindsey has been hit by a car in Shanghai, they journey there to be by her side and to uncover the truth of what her life was really like in China.⁣
⁣
I loved the way Haigh built her characters and the tender, but tense relationships between them. There were deep insights and contours that made this fractured family very believable. Other, less prominent characters, equally well-done, added even more depth. I also was fascinated by the Shanghai setting where much of the story took place. ⁣
⁣
I’ve never read Jennifer Haigh before, but after reading 𝘙𝘢𝘣𝘣𝘪𝘵 𝘔𝘰𝘰𝘯 I think I need to rectify that situation. She has a deep backlist, so any suggestions as to which of her books I should try? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Jennifer Haigh's Rabbit Moon is a masterful exploration of family, identity, and cultural intersections, set against the vibrant backdrop of Shanghai. The novel begins with a tragic hit-and-run accident that leaves Lindsey Litvak, a young American woman teaching English in China, in a coma. As her divorced parents rush to her side, they confront not only the mysteries of Lindsey's life abroad but also the unresolved fractures within their own family. Haigh's storytelling moves seamlessly between past and present, weaving together Lindsey’s fragmented narrative with the perspectives of her parents and younger sister Grace. The richly drawn characters grapple with themes of love, betrayal, and the consequences of choices—both personal and societal. Shanghai itself emerges as a dynamic character, its bustling streets and cultural contrasts mirroring the complexities of the Litvak family's journey. With lyrical prose and poignant insights into human frailty, Rabbit Moon is a deeply affecting novel that lingers long after its final page. Haigh’s ability to delve into profound issues like adoption ethics and familial alienation while maintaining an engaging narrative cements her as one of contemporary literature’s finest voices.

A quiet and restrained novel that explores the ways both chance and action can influence our lives. Considering this book was relatively short, it had a very well developed cast of characters radiating outward from Lindsey, our protagonist who is injured in a hit-and-run accident in Shanghai at the start of the story. The reader learns about why she is in Shanghai, her damaged relationship with her parents, her love for her adopted younger sister Grace, and the choices she makes which lead her to the moment when she is struck down by a careless driver in a city far from home. This had the feel of an epic family saga that dips backward in time and explores the lives of each character but again over the course of a much shorter novel than you’d expect from such a wide scope.
I appreciate that while there was drama and tension to the story, it was not over-the top and felt very realistic. A less talented writer might have chosen to manufacture coincidental connections between characters but this was kept to a minimum despite the “red thread” theory that was explored with Grace’s section at the end. Overall I found this story to be quite moving and satisfying and the characters will stick with me. Thank you to NetGalley as well as Little, Brown, and Company for providing me with an e-galley of this title in exchange for my honest thoughts.

What an interesting look at mom guilt at its finest. Strong character development. A slow burn plot. Interesting, but just not quite enough to keep my attention.

Becoming is a lifelong process

Just before dawn on a Sunday morning in Shanghai, twenty two year old Lindsey Litvak is standing on a street corner waiting for a car to pick her up. She is in the financial district so the streets are deserted, she has her earbuds in listening to music and is texting people in her life. It is just bad luck that an inebriated young man driving much too fast takes the corner too sharply, hitting the unsuspecting Lindsey and sending her body flying. The driver has no idea what he has done and continues on, leaving Lindsey unconscious on the pavement. While she lies comatose in a nearby hospital the police work to identify her; once they have done so, they notify the American consulate. Claire, Lindsey's mother, gets a late night call informing her that her daughter has been injured in a hit and run. She and her ex-husband Aaron head to China as quickly as they can, stunned at the news and uncertain of what the future may hold, leaving their younger daughter Grace at the summer camp where she has spent the last few weeks. Nothing makes sense....why was Lindsey in Shanghai when, to the best of their knowledge, she was in Beijing teaching English? Why was she in the financial district at that time of night, dressed in a party dress and standing on a corner? There are many question and many fault lines in the LItvak family relationships which slowly come to light as the story unfolds, any of which may have played a role in Lindsey being in that particular place at that particular time. The only thing that is certain is that none of their lives will ever be the same.
There are some novels that from the first pages that I read I am immediately transported into the story that is unfolding, the characters seiming so real and the tale too intriguing not to follow until the end. Rabbit Moon is just such a novel, and in the hands of an author as gifted as Jennifer Haigh it came as no great surprise to me that I was so instantly invested in the people to whom I was being introduced. Lindsey is the biggest mystery, the reader learns about who she is, what has impacted her life, why she has come to China, and what she is doing there only gradually. Johnny Du, who presents himself to his parents as the good son they want him to be while living a very different life when in the city, has become Lindsey's best friend in Shanghai...together they can be completely themselves and shed the personas they present to the world. Claire, who has been estranged from her daughter the last two years, is devastated at Lindsey's condition and is desperate to find a way to make her well. Aaron, always a distant father to his children as they grew up as he worked to build his company, now becomes fixated on solving what happened, who was driving the car, certain the police aren't doing their job. And Grace, the daughter they adopted from China years earlier, stuck at a camp she didn't want to go to in the first place and being given only limited information about what has happened to the older sister she adores, knows that something is horribly wrong. Weaving together themes of the bonds of sisterhood, the question of identity, the failures of marriage and the effects a divorce has on every member of the family, imperfect families, cultural divides, and the corrosive nature of guilt, Ms Haigh has crafted a beautiful, gripping and heartbreaking tale of a family who has lived through painful trials and must now confront their worst nightmare. The writing is taut but lovely, the characters beautifully drawn and nuanced, and the story a hypnotic read...I rate it 4.5 ⭐️ rounded up to 5.. Fans of the author's previous novels will not want to miss this latest offering, and readers of Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout and Lily King will not regret picking up a copy at the earliest opportunity. My thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for allowing me access to a copy of this book which took hold of me from the very first page.

A red-haired woman standing on the side of a road in Shanghai is hit by a car, then hours later is transported to the hospital. The police contact her parents, Aaron and Claire Litvak, who quickly make their way to China, leaving their other daughter, Grace, behind at summer camp. Both parents believed Lindsey to have been teaching English in Beijing for the last two years, so they're surprised to find her in a hospital 800 miles away, living in a sterile apartment full of fancy dresses. The story explores Aaron and Claire's differing reactions and priorities in the face of Lindsey's crisis, how Lindsey ended up where she was, and the impact that all of these events had on the family.

The story was told through alternating and perspectives and timelines, which showed how different characters interpreted events differently. This also helped to highlight why some of their relationships to each other were so dysfunctional. The story mostly focuses on the members of the Litvak family, but it also includes some people who were in the periphery of the events. I found the writing to be quite beautiful, although it did hold the characters at a little bit of a distance. I think I would have liked it even more if it had gone just a little bit more in depth with the characters. The book explores themes of adoption, family, heritage, and romantic relationships and their complications. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy stories about the dynamics of relationships both romantic and familial.

A young American woman living in Shanghai is the victim of a random hit-and-run. Lindsey ends up in the hospital, in critical condition. How did she find herself in Shanghai? What brought her to the street she was on when she was hit? In Rabbit Moon, Jennifer Haigh digs deep to answer these questions and more.

Lindsey's divorced parents arrive in Shanghai. Her younger sister Grace, adopted from a Chinese orphanage as an infant, remains stateside at summer camp. The narrative spins around these family members, their back stories in this propulsive family drama. Vibrant Shanghai is a character too as these Americans, fish out of water, try to deal with Chinese culture and bureaucracy, and their pasts.

This novel is moving, poignant, and pointed. Haigh's characters are individuals with unique motivations, unique responses to the traumas they face. There's a good dose of humor too - Grace at camp, the divorced parents navigating being together after their divorce, American tourists in China... and Lindsey herself, a spitfire.

My thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown for the Advance Reader Copy. (pub date 4/1/2025)

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of Rabbit Moon.

When their daughter's tragic accident in Shanghai brings two divorced parents together, the former couple is forced to come to terms about their child's life and the events that culminate at their daughter's bedside.

I liked the descriptions of Shanghai but I didn't understand the point of the story.

Why should we care about the Litvaks?

The parents are deeply unlikable and spend the better part of their time in Shanghai bemoaning the other person's flaws and eccentricities.

Why did these people get married at all?

Lindsey is young, beautiful, and impressionable, and has deeply-rooted Freudian Daddy issues.

This is apparent from the terrible choices she makes with men and how susceptible she is to certain types of men, namely married men with families. She's obviously seeking a father figure since her own father works tirelessly and ceaselessly and rarely spent any time with him.

Johnny, Lindsey's BFF, and Grace, her adopted sister from China, are the only interesting characters but even their character development is brief.

The writing is good, but dry, the tone informative, lacking depth, empathy and emotion.

There were parts of the narrative that read as filler like the POV of Sun, the landlord. I guess it was to highlight his own feelings for Lindsey and the young ladies renting in his building.

I'm left wondering what's the point of the story?

Is it about Grace, navigating two worlds, her Chinese side and her adopted side by white parents in America? Her enduring love for her sister?

Is it about Lindsey, who never achieved her true potential because of the poor decisions she made?

Is it about their parents, who seem better off without the other, and ironically seem to have flourished after the eldest child's death?

Or is it just about a dysfunctional family and we all know one or are a part of one so who cares?

3.5 stars —

• when they find out their 22-year-old daughter lindsay has been hurt in a hit-and-run in china, where she’s been teaching english, divorced parents claire & aaron rush to her side. the accident reopens old wounds, and forces them to reexamine the event that ended their marriage & estranged lindsay from them. one thing’s for sure though: nothing is what it seems.
• this story was fast-paced, and the changing perspectives really allowed the reader to see the different sides of what happened & how we got here. i particularly liked learning lindsay’s side of events, and why she ended up in shanghai (when she was thought to be in beijing).
• the audiobook narration for this book was really well done, especially when we got grace’s perspective (with a new narrator) in the final chapter.

When I was 24, I lived In Beijing for 6 months. I went with the naivete of a young foreigner, learning barely any mandarin and assuming I could get by on English and lots of hand gestures (I could not). It was an incredibly challenging period of my life but one that I loved and am eternally grateful for. For this reason, novels about expats in China are particularly close to my heart.

In RABBIT MOON, Lindsey lives in Shanghai. She has been intrigued by Chinese culture since she travelled with her mother to adopt her little sister Grace ten years earlier. When Lindsey's divorced parents receive a call that Lindsey is in the hospital in Shanghai- and not Beijing where they think she has been living for the past 2 years- as a result of a hit and run, their lives are shattered. As Lindsey lies in a coma, their thoughts travel from why Lindsey lied about where she is living and what might have driven her to drop out of college and move halfway across the world in the first place.

Lindsey was a young girl when something bad happened that subconsciously impacted all facets of her life since. Lindsey thinks she has moved on, but like poison, the event from her past has seeped into every decision she's made and altered her life's current trajectory. Lindsey's parents are still at odds over the issue. Lindsey's father thinks he handled the issue the best way he could: Lindsey's mother disagrees and can't forgive him for it. In their anger it seems that what they have forgotten is Lindsey herself.

This is a beautifully written novel about familial relationships and the breakdown of relationships between husbands and wives, fathers and mothers and daughters. It is told in 3 parts- Lindsey's parents POV, Lindsey's POV and then an amalgamation of other supporting characters' POVs, such as Lindsey's gay best friend Johnny Du, her childhood friend, her building managers and ending with her sister Grace, who also makes an appearance earlier in the book.

I was left wanting a little more from the ending, however. The first two-thirds of the book were so compelling and unputdownable, I just wish the last third had packed a bigger punch and perhaps addressed some of the accountability that had been misplaced by the adults in the first two parts.

Haigh is a new to me author but I will definitely be checking out her other publications. Thank you Little, Brown and Company and Hachette Book Group Canada for my copy.

firstly, thank you to the publisher for an arc and an alc!

this was a sad read about a broken american family facing their complicated past after the eldest daughter dies in a hit and run in china, but i really didn’t feel connected to any members of the family, or the supporting cast.

as for the audio, i loved that there were two narrators, and both did a fantastic job!

Thank you, NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company, for allowing me to read this book early. The opinion in this review is my own.

Lindsay was the victim of a hit-and-run accident while living in China. Her divorced parents need to come together and go to Shanghai to be with Lindsay while she’s in a coma. The last time they spoke with Lindsay, she was working to teach English to Chinese children. Lindsay confides in her adopted sister, Grace, who is a native born Chinese. Grace is the only person in the family who knows what Lindsay is actually doing in Shanghai.

Told in past and present timelines with multiple viewpoints that divulge little bits of information at a time. This book was paced well, but was deliberately written to be a bit slower. It’s one you should plan to take your time with. The writing is beautiful and the dialogue feels natural. This book raised lots of topics like inter-racial adoption. sister love, cultural issues with sexism and homosexuality, broken families, and many more, but I don’t want to give any spoilers. This book gives the reader a lot to think about. The ending had a bit too many coincidences for my liking. Sometimes, that feels like an easy way to wrap up a story, and I didn’t appreciate that. I highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates literary fiction.

Set in Shanghai, Lindsey Litvak, a 22 year old taking a gap year to "teach English" is involved in a hit and run accident, propelling her divorced parents to Shanghai to deal with the aftermath and her sister, her closest confident and also Chinese born, to deal with the grief after losing her sister. This book covers a LOT of themes, but the author is an expert storyteller.

Positives:
Many themes addressed: divorce, intercultural adoption, sister relationships, family dramas, underage sexual relationships, sex workers and abuse, death.
The character of the younder sister, Grace, added SO much to the storyline and character development. The book would not have been complete without her and the final 20% of the book.
Writing and pacing were excellent

Negatives:
I wish we could have heard from Grace and her storyline throughout the novel. More about what she went through being adopted from China and raised in a upper class Boston suburb by white parents.

Smart, thought-provoking, sad, and wistful—this was such a sympathetic portrait of two sisters and the circumstances that pushed them to places they never dreamed they'd go. I couldn't put this down.

Thank you to the publisher, Little, Brown & Co. for an advance copy of this amazing novel. This was my first Jennifer Haigh novel, and I'm already eager to consume her backlist. How have I missed out all these years?

Rabbit Moon is a story about family - Aaron, Claire, and their daughters Lindsey and Grace. Claire and Aaron are divorced. Lindsey, their tall red-haired daughter, dropped out of Wesleyan and, long fascinated by the country, moved to China to teach English. Grace, who was adopted as an infant from China, is 10 years younger than Lindsey. Lindsey is hit by a car in the first few pages of the story. Early one morning, a groggy Claire receives a call from the United States Consulate in Shanghai with the news that her daughter has been gravely injured and is in the hospital. Shocked and confused (Lindsey was supposed to be teaching English in Beijing) Claire is on a flight to China as quickly as possible. She meets Aaron there, and together they navigate a land that is very foreign, and a daughter it seems they hardly knew at all.

Rabbit Moon - while about a broken family on a macro level - does a brilliant job of demonstrating the devastation caused by failure of communication. When Aaron and Claire receive the life-altering news of their daughter's accident, neither can remember the last real conversation they had with her, nor had either of them seen her since she left for China two years prior. Lindsey's closest friend in Shanghai, Jun (Johnny) Du, unable to tell his family he's gay, lies to them every Sunday about his 'girlfriend" Lin. Grace, though "100% Han Chinese" was adopted by Aaron and Claire at 7 months old, and doesn't know a word of Mandarin. As an adult, as she looks at pictures of Lindsey, she studies a tattoo on Lindsey's shoulder. It's a Mandarin character, and Grace needs a friend to translate for her. It's Grace. Taken aback, Grace things, "I should have been able to recognize myself."

The story comes full circle in the end, though perhaps with once coincidence too many. I enjoyed this book immensely, and I'll happily recommend it to anyone who asks.

Pre-Read notes

I was offered a widget of this one. I liked the premise, so I grabbed it. The cover drew me in as well. I am reading and enjoying a few different stories about decolonization, an important theme that makes good stories.

Final Review

The little boy was a preexisting condition; Shen had made him with another woman without knowing there was a Lindsey in the world. But for him to have a second child with his wife would be an unspeakable betrayal, an anguish too terrible to bear. p113

Review summary and recommendations

Sun’s grandmother is dead now, his wife, his parents . He has no children or grandchildren. He is a human island, unconnected to any living person on Earth. p164

Reading Notes

Three things I loved:

1. Without his glasses, he looked younger and gentler, curiously undefended. It was more intimate, in a way, than seeing him naked. p112 One of the hardest things to write in fiction is vulnerability. Here and elsewhere, Haigh masterfully describes that subtle drive possessed by every creature--measuring the risk implicit in everything we to, to one degree or another.

2. This book builds to an incredibly tense and suspenseful second act, leveraging a timeline that is just experimental enough, insightful character development, and a compelling storyline about how our choices and actions can pigeonhole us into the tiny boxes in other people's minds.

3. She had never smoked a cigarette in her life. Meanwhile, Sun, who has smoked since age ten, is in perfect health. It’s a diabolical punishment, a fate worse than cancer, to have caused the death of the woman he loved. Thinking of it fills him with despair, which makes him want to smoke. Since her death, it is his only consolation. p163 This book is full of this wonderful, heartbreaking irony.

One thing I didn't love:

This section isn't only for criticisms. It's merely for items that I felt something for other than "love" or some interpretation thereof.

1. I don't usually go for oscillating timelines, but I find this captivating. One reason why it is successful is because the transitions from one section to another are clean and the storyline remains logical.

Rating: 🐇🐇🐇🐇 /5 rabbits
Recommend? yes
Finished: Mar 10 '25
Format: accessible digital arc, NetGalley
Read this book if you like:
🙃 irony
👩🏻‍🤝‍👩🏼 sister stories
👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 family drama
🪢 experimental form

Thank you to the author Jennifer Haigh, publishers Little, Brown, & Co., and NetGalley for an accessible advance digital copy of RABBIT MOON. All views are mine.
---------------

Lindsey Litvak’s parents get a call notifying them that Lindsey has been hit by a car and is in a coma. They know nothing of her life in China, as she only speaks with her adopted sister, Grace, since she moved abroad. As pieces of her life in China is revealed, they realize they knew even less than they thought.

This was my favorite book of Jennifer Haigh’s yet. It’s a new adult story incorporating a lot of culture and nuances of coming of age in a culture different than your own. I loved how we are looking backwards into what happened before the accident and learning as we go. I also loved how every character had different information and took away a different version of the story. That for me was piece de resistance because it was so true to life and not wrapped up neatly like a lot of literature is. Lindsey and Grace are both such unique characters, and very different from each other. This is a book you’ll want to take your time with and truly absorb.

“We live at the intersection of causality and chance.”

Rabbit Moon comes out 4/1.

I know this book has gotten alot of pre release press and I was really looking forward to diving in. Although I enjoyed the writing, overall, not so sure I would recommend it. A bit slow a bit off but I wish you the best with the book.