Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks' marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous 'miracle city,' they face troubling questions about Lindsey's life there, in which nothing is quite as it seems.
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.
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.
Ms. Haigh describes these experiences with empathy but few revealing details and little tension. There’s too much exposition in Rabbit Moon, whose sketchy, unfocused quality will surprise readers of the author’s richly peopled earlier novels ... It’s a foreigner’s Shanghai, glimpsed partially and without an interpreter.
