"Rabbit Moon" | Reviewed by Chris Stuckenschneider

Lindsey, a red-haired American girl who works in the bustling city of Shanghai is out late when tragedy strikes. A driver high on rice wine runs a red light and hits Lindsey, tossing her to the pavement and leaving her with a serious head injury.

So begins a nightmare for her divorced parents and their younger daughter Grace, a Chinese girl they adopted at birth, kept in the dark about the real reason Lindsey isn’t coming home for a while. “Rabbit Moon” is Jennifer Haigh's newest. Previously she penned the much-lauded novel “Mercy Street.”

The night of the accident Lindsey doesn’t reply to texts from her friend Johnny Du. This is so out of characters for Lindsey that he’s sure something is wrong. The two lonely, offbeat souls depend on each other—their relationship with their families built on mistruths. Johnny and Lindsey live fabricated lives, and are the offspring of unhappy, unfilled parents.

Lindsey moved to China following a crisis that occurred when she was a teenager. She simply couldn't live with her parents after a shameful, personal secret came to light. Lindsey believes her mom and dad, Claire and Aaron, were grossly unfair and cruel, and they were shocked that Lindsey couldn't understand their dismay and heartbeak, big feelings so unmanageable the couple couldn't work through them.

Claire and Aaron separate, and to get distance Lindsey sets off for China to teach English with her boyfriend Zach, an arrangement that works for a while and then doesn’t, Zach returning to the States, and Lindsey venturing off to Shanghai, a city she’s wanted to visit and which captivates her with its incessant energy. When Lindsey is offered a job there by a women she meets by chance, the opportunity sounds too intriguing to refuse. Before she knows it, Lindsey has fallen victim to a lifestyle she couldn’t have imagined, her parents having no idea about the path their oldest daughter is walking.

“Rabbit Moon” is a story that immediately draws you in—the horror of an adult child so far away from home hanging onto life by the thinnest of threads unimaginable. As readers get to know Lindsey and her parents, sympathy with this particular character or that may shift because of the complicated issues they face.

At times Lindsey seems incorrigible, but does she receive the support she desperately needs when faced with a situation no young woman should have to endure?

Questions are raised in a novel that has “book club read” written all over it. There’s also the teeming city of Shanghai to discuss, which Haigh found “astonishing” when in 2016 the Shanghai Writers’ Association “gave (her) time and space to write” when she was working on “Rabbit Moon.”

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