Praise for Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit

“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, author of the nationally bestselling and Nation Book Critics Circle Award-winning Girlhood: Essays

“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 After the Eclipse: A Memoir

“In Coco McCracken’s fantastic, punkified coming-of-age story, we get invited to the mosh pits and the smoke-filled, teenage basements and the cramped backseats of cars in search of belonging. It comes at a cost. Because in this searing memoir, a battle is being waged inside our narrator: whiteness has taken “a hammer to the Asian girl." McCracken’s electrifying prose locates the site of the wounds—of both self-love and mother love. The book reminds us forcibly that memory can help us heal if we pin it to the page this beautifully.”

—Susan Conley, author of five award-winning books including the novels Landslide and Elsey Come Home

“The beauty in The Rabbit is that it is so very relatable to those who have longed, loved, lost, and learned… and it is a testament to not just the universality but the multiversality of the intersectional experience [of] the coming-of-age experience of Coco McCracken.”

—Marpheen Chann, author of Moon in Full: A Modern Coming-of-Age Story

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