Adept if patchy ... Haigh holds a steady narrative momentum as she bores into each character’s backstory ... Shanghai emerges as a character in its own right, frocked in vivid detail ... At times, though, Haigh’s descriptions feel desultory, random entries in a writer’s notebook ... It’s a solid book that doesn’t quite soar, but at its best it plumbs the elements that compose love.
Plunges us into gritty, real-world conditions and issues. Its voice — brisk, capable, almost reportorial — also functions as a high-speed camera ... Haigh’s narrative resembles a police procedural — one that prowls widely to disclose backstories and contexts. Its foremost strength, and Haigh’s steadiest skill, is to fully inhabit disparate minds, hopscotching among genders, ages, economic classes and cultures ... If the adaptive responses of certain characters to what befalls them feel somewhat idealized — a kind of ad hoc dusting of mercy — Rabbit Moon remains impressive for its scope, ambition, vibrant characters and its unsettlingly graphic, resonant story.
The backstories of these and other complex and memorable characters are told, and the novel concludes with a glimpse into their futures ... A gripping novel of suspense, infused with great empathy.
Engrossing ... Capturing both the possibilities of reinvention and the scars carried from a traumatic past, Haigh’s searing novel examines the interplay between choice and chance.
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.
