Publishers Weekly
02/10/2025
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.)
From the Publisher
A tense tale of secrets, estrangement and self-discovery.”—People Magazine
"I ripped hungrily through Rabbit Moon... impressive for its scope, ambition, vibrant characters and its unsettlingly graphic, resonant story."—Joan Frank, Washington Post
“Capturing both the possibilities of reinvention and the scars carried from a traumatic past, Haigh's searing novel examines the interplay between choice and chance.”—Booklist
"A portrait, told in time jumps, of a family fractured by nothing so much as their own profoundly human flaws."—NPR
“A gripping novel of suspense, infused with great empathy.”—Library Journal (starred review)
"Haigh’s achievement in Rabbit Moon is to combine the intellectual heft of a philosophical novel with the readerly pleasures of a thriller...Haigh has an acute appreciation of moral ambiguity, especially regarding wounded characters who struggle to find a way forward. Honest about self-destruction but optimistic about redemption, Haigh’s novel ponders the big questions but doesn’t settle for the faux comfort of easy answers.”—Chapter 16
"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."—Publishers Weekly
“Jennifer Haigh renders her characters and contemporary Shanghai with compelling richness and exhilarating precision. This taut, devastating novel about a young woman's dark fate—at once avoidable and inexorable—will remain with you long after you put it down.”—Claire Messud
“Gripping, propulsive and entirely credible, Rabbit Moon succeeds in multiple dimensions and gets Shanghai right. Brava!”—Gish Jen, author of Thank you, Mr. Nixon
Library Journal
★ 03/01/2025
In this, her seventh novel, bestselling Haigh (Mercy Street) introduces protagonist Lindsey Litvak, who has left college to teach English in Beijing. In the wee hours of a Sunday morning in the financial district of Shanghai, Lindsey is unconscious on the sidewalk, having been critically injured by a hit-and-run driver. An ambulance takes her to the hospital, and as the hospital staff tends to her, a police detective finds her name and contact information and calls her father in California, who, with her mother, rushes to be with the injured Lindsey. Not only are the parents trying to find out exactly what happened and what Lindsey's condition and prognosis are, but this is their first time together since their divorce. Being together in this challenging period only layers on more stress, and dealing with the Chinese bureaucracies (while knowing little Chinese) makes things worse. They go through Lindsey's apartment, but nothing there is recognizable as Lindsey's—and what is she even doing in Shanghai? The backstories of these and other complex and memorable characters are told, and the novel concludes with a glimpse into their futures. VERDICT A gripping novel of suspense, infused with great empathy.—Marcia Welsh
MARCH 2025 - AudioFile
Narrators Katharine Chin and Yu-Li Alice Shen transport listeners with their portrayals of complex characters in this literary audiobook. American Lindsey Litvak, age 22, is fighting for her life in a Shanghai hospital after a hit-and-run accident. Her divorced parents rush to China to be by her side, but they don't speak the language and struggle to navigate their new surroundings. Chin, who serves as the third-person narrator, captures the story's strong sense of place and the tension in the complex family relationships as the story jumps between the present and past. Shen narrates the final chapter through the perspective of Lindsey's adopted younger sister, Grace. Her mature portrayal imbues Grace with depth and emotional growth. A compelling character-driven family drama. V.T.M. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2025-03-08
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.
