Ponder Post: Rabbit Cake

Eva Rose Babbitt, the mother of two daughters, eleven year old daughter Elvis, and fifteen year old Lizzie, drowns while sleepwalking. Rabbit Cake ©2017 by Annie Hartnett is written from the point of view of Elvis as she tries to cope with her mom's death and navigate the grieving process, which she has been told takes 18 months. One of the reviewers (Beth Hoffman) states, "Heartbreak and dark comedy fuse together in this endearing story of family dysfunction and loss." I agree with every single word in this quote except the term "endearing". I hated this book.

Elvis and Lizzie's father starts wearing their mother's bathrobe and slippers around the house and carries a parrot on his shoulder who mimics the voice of his wife. Lizzie sleep-eats and breaks into chicken coops at night to eat the raw eggs, later spending several months in a mental institution. Part of her healing process from the death of the mother is baking 1000 rabbit shaped cakes to be entered into the Guinness Book of World Records. Elvis hallucinates that some of these cakes are twitching or otherwise moving. Meanwhile Elvis is researching the cause of her mother's death thinking it is a brain tumor that caused the drowning. She is also finishing her mother's book on animals and is very much an expert and fan of the naked mole rat. Elvis is a volunteer at the zoo and becomes distraught when a chain saw is employed to cut off the long neck of a deceased giraffe so it will fit in a truck to be taken to a crematorium at the zoo. A classmate at school is ostracized because she had a urinary tract infection that classmates think is a sexually transmitted disease. Are you ready to run right out and read this book yet? Dysfunctional is putting it mildly. It is downright weird in a Monty Python type of warped sense.

If this book were made into a movie it would go straight to DVD. After watching along with someone, each of you would turn to the other after the movie's conclusion and say incredulously, "Huh?" Or perhaps it might be screened as a film at the Sundance Film Festival. When I watch those productions they are usually too deep or too dumb for me to understand. This is a definitely a contender for those Sundance oddities.

Strangely enough when I looked at the review of this book on Amazon it is regaled as great and given 4+ stars. Why is my opinion so different from those other readers? Perhaps those reviews were submitted by those in the know from the literary crowd. I associate myself with the little child in the story of The Emperor's New Clothes who has nothing to lose by stating the obvious.

Probably equally strange is that I stuck with this book and finished it, clinging to the Pollyanna belief that it had to get better. I wasted my time. Hippity-hop away from this book as fast as you can. It was terrible. It never got better. The best part about it was that it ended.

Ponder Post: The Trophy Child

Parenting is most certainly an individual matter of style and opinion, running the gamut from lazy, laissez faire under-involvement to zealous, uber-organized, rigid domination. Helicopter parenting and stage moms are often viewed with disdain. Karen Bloom  has the reputation of being a tiger mom, a seemingly derogatory title but one she is proud to wield. I expected the topic of this book to be about the precocious or overachieving child and parental interactions. It was on one of the round display carousels for new arrivals and caught my eye as I was exiting the library. I was curious so I checked it out.

The Trophy Child ©2017 by Paula Daly is so much more than merely a diatribe on parenting. It is an engaging, page turning, crime mystery, with psychological undertones and character intrigue. The basic family unit under the literary microscope is Noel the father, his second wife Karen, Noel's daughter and Karen's stepdaughter high school aged Verity, Karen's children young-adult son Ewan, and Karen and Noel's ten-year old daughter Brontë. Also playing a key role are Verity's mother Jennifer and Detective Sergeant Joanne Aspinall. The characters are well developed and although they are not one-dimensional I very quickly formed my unambiguous allegiance with those I liked, those I rooted for, those I felt sorry for, those who impressed me, and my downright despisal of those who irritated me.

This novel is a crime mystery and the first book that I have read by this author. Crime mystery is Paula Daly's genre and some reviews say this was not her best work. If that is indeed true, then I definitely plan to seek out and read some of her other books. The Trophy Child surprised me with at least three plot twists I did not see coming. Perhaps a more astute reader or one more familiar with the author would have sensed them, but I most certainly did not. Each turn of affairs was plausible, too, not like in some frustrating, inferior murder mystery where the crime is committed by some random character who had not even been introduced in the first three-quarters of the book. I thoroughly relished the prickly poke each surprise revelation gave to my somewhat complacent line of thought up to that point.

So what is the crime you ask? In the extreme could the treatment of an over scheduled child be viewed as a crime, a sort of child abuse? Or is it one (or more) other crimes? You will need to read this to find out. I will not spoil it for you.