Book Review: Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody

Kate Brody’s arresting debut novel delves deep into the center of a contemporary younger girl making an attempt to make sense of a lifetime of tragedy with its unrelenting tides of grief. When Teddy Angstrom’s father kills himself on the tenth anniversary of her sister’s disappearance, Teddy and her mom Clare are virtually too numb to react. Angie Angstrom hadn’t been her father’s favourite daughter, precisely, however he had been the one particular person able to dealing with the teenage woman within the years earlier than she vanished. Teddy had definitely relied on him to assist defend her from her unstable elder sister:

When she did shake me awake in order that she may yell at me for some perceived slight, a way that I assumed I used to be higher than her or ignored her in school or no matter, I’d tune it out and need for Dad. And more often than not, he heard me calling for him in my head. More often than not, he was there inside a minute or two to whisk Angie downstairs for a pot of espresso and a severe speak and plenty of crying.

 

Mother thought he was too tender, too sympathetic. She thought Angie was getting caught on goal, in order that she may get his consideration.

Dad and Angie had each suffered from substance abuse points, an issue that was solely exacerbated for Dad after Angie went lacking. Teddy had recognized that her father was broken, however solely discovers the extent of his grief after Clare asks her for assist sorting by his private results and their payments. Teddy is horrified to find how broke her mom is now, and mystified by the puzzling bills her father had incurred earlier than he died. As she seeks to shut his accounts and make life simpler for her mom, she finds that he had been concerned with numerous on-line communities nonetheless in search of solutions as to what may need occurred to Angie.

Unable to withstand carrying on his work, Teddy begins calling the numbers on his burner cellphone and making posts on the web sites he frequented. Her inquiries quickly deliver her not solely to a romantic entanglement with a determine from her previous, but additionally into the orbit of a disarmingly quirky teenager named Mickey, who reminds her uncomfortably of Angie. And whereas, at first, her sleuthing is in service of her father’s reminiscence, she rapidly involves the belief that that is all her method of coping with her nonetheless unresolved anguish over each his demise and Angie’s disappearance. At the very least she is aware of why her father died. Nobody in her household has but been ready to determine what occurred to Angie and why.

Due to this, Teddy remains to be suffering from her reminiscences of her sister, and by her personal actions ten years prior:

Different occasions—more often than not—I felt good about preserving Angie’s meaningless secrets and techniques. Angie—I’d assume, again once I nonetheless almost-prayed to her—Ange, I informed them subsequent to nothing. And in my prayers, she would pat my head appreciatively. I imagined her coming again and realizing how severely I took our confidence. I imagined us rising nearer than we’d ever been. Angie taking me severely. Each of us in our twenties, in our thirties—greatest buddies. Angie realizing that I used to be the one one who cared about who she was. The 2 of us residing like sisters in a film, laughing and guffawing within the daylight collectively, crying with one another at evening.

Haunted as a lot by the lack of her sister as an actuality as she is by the lack of her sister as a risk, Teddy is pushed to make more and more dangerous selections in her pursuit of the reality. However when her personal survival is at stake, will Teddy have the ability to prioritize her current as an alternative of chasing after a shadowed previous or a fantasy future that appears ever much less probably with every of her impulsive strikes?

Pensive and grave, Rabbit Gap examines how the Web permits the emotionally unstable to not solely escape from actuality but additionally to seek out group, for higher or worse. As a substitute of processing her grief, Teddy permits trendy know-how to distract her with hits of dopamine, in a lot the identical method that older generations used mind-altering substances or different dissociative gadgets to deal with their ache. Whereas this e-book doesn’t present definitive solutions as to what occurred to Angie, the aftereffects of her disappearance are clearly outlined, with each unflinching realism and an virtually painful stage of empathy. Teddy is a catastrophe, however she’s additionally very human and vivid, the peerlessly portrayed protagonist of this darkish psychological thriller.

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