Overview

The Rabbit is a story of a girl hiding behind the camera, and in telling her story, she is courageously pushing herself in front of it. As a photographer by trade and writer by avocation, Coco McCracken takes us through her photo album. Here is her childhood. These are her teenage years. That's her family. This is alcoholism. This is divorce. Those people are her friends. That guy there? He is her heartthrob. He is also her heartbreak. Kazuo Ishiguro, in his 2017 Nobel Prize speech, says, But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you? Like all the best storytellers and photographers, Coco McCracken is asking her own version of those questions, asking the reader to see the beauty and sadness and transcendence that she sees. -From the Introduction to The Rabbit, by Phuc Tran

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9781735673240

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The Rabbit engulfed me in its pitch-perfect voice, which evokes the sorrow and elation of teenaged girlhood while implying the wise retrospective gaze of its narrator. From Snow White and Princess Diana to the peril and sublimity of the mosh pit, Coco McCracken lucidly articulates the ordinary and acute conflicts that attend coming of age, and the resiliency of her young protagonist. -Melissa Febos, best-selling author of Girlhood, which was also awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award Coco McCracken's The Rabbit is a vivid and deeply compassionate chronicle of those painfully weird gray hours of adolescence, when a young person has no choice but to see the world only for what it is--and nothing more or less. The arc of the story begins with McCracken as observer: watching others in her life--her charismatic mother, the performative young men she looks to for street cred--as a silent anthropologist of her Canadian hometown. As the arc tightens, McCracken's quiet self moves to the center of the story, where her voice--as a person, as a writer--starts to shimmer and burn. It's in this confrontation of self and other that she offers us the most difficult truths of growing up: that bearing witness to our own capacity for cruelty is sometimes a prerequisite for self-knowledge; that our most basic longing to do good can often end with a brick through a window. -Jaed Coffin, author of the memoirs A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants and Roughhouse Friday In The Rabbit, Coco McCracken has created a portal back to the confusing, electrifying, sublime years of teenage exploration. She artfully portrays fresh desire-for romance, for belonging, for the fully-realized self-thus dignifying a life era that is too often brushed aside. In this story, scenes are so sharply drawn that you can smell the smoke and sweat, feel the smudged eyeliner on your own slick cheek, and characters-from Van-clad punk kids to a wildly irreverent but loving mother-feel like the real people they are. McCracken's insights about racialized beauty standards, about family disintegration, about the challenges of taking up both literal and psychic space as a young woman, leap from the narrative, infused with the wisdom of years spent as the person we see her becoming in these pages. I'm so glad she became that person, so she could write this for us. -Sarah Perry, author of the memoir After the Eclipse

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