RABBIT MOON

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.