When God Was a Rabbit (2011)

Winman has an authorial tendency to pick at life’s proverbial scabs. But while her plot traffics heavily in grim incident, she maintains a winning proportion of whimsy throughout. At the very least, she’s created the most amusing and emotionally satisfying work of rabbit deism to come down the pike in a long time. I give it five carrots.

It is the story of Ellie, a girl growing up in 1970s Essex who has decided to call her pet rabbit God. On the brink of adolescence, she observes the world with both a childish sense of wonder and the unflinching, no-nonsense perspective of a young person. The second act, in which she is an adult, is less intriguing simply because it is necessarily more grown up – even though Ellie herself is resistant to behaving like one – and when events like 9/11 come into focus, even though they are handled in a refreshingly unpredictable way, the terrain begins to feel much more familiar. That said, the characters' personal stories; those of Ellie's brother, his friend Charlie, and her correspondence with her long-lost childhood playmate, Jenny Penny, are compelling throughout; rendered with an appealing frankness, precision and emotional acuity.

Despite the gravity of events, Winman pulls a good number of rabbits from her hat in a picaresque coming-of-age tale where characters disappear then shockingly reappear. This affecting and original debut is recommended for most public libraries.

There are books that tug on the heartstrings, and then there are full-on tractor pulls. When God Was a Rabbit falls into the latter category. Sarah Winman’s debut novel has been attracting a great deal of buzz lately, as tearjerkers sometimes will; add to which, her prose also has an elegiac, simple beauty, which she uses to nimbly guide her characters through 30-odd eventful years of history. Butboy, is this book rife with personal calamity....In any case, misery is not what has got the literati abuzz where Rabbit is concerned. If it were merely a bleak catalogue of bad luck, people wouldn’t be talking about it the way they are. The book’s appeal lies in the fact that its top note is one of hope: The cooling balm of renewal invariably follows each terrible test of human endurance (imagine Kafka taking tea with Disney, and you’ll get the idea). Some horrors ring authentically here, others less so, but the message is that you can get through pretty much anything. That’s trite to say, and maybe not even true. But it’s remarkable how we never get tired of hearing it.