Book Review: Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody

Kate Brody’s arresting debut novel delves deep into the heart of a modern young woman trying to make sense of a life of tragedy with its unrelenting tides of grief. When Teddy Angstrom’s father kills himself on the tenth anniversary of her sister’s disappearance, Teddy and her mother Clare are almost too numb to react. Angie Angstrom hadn’t been her father’s favorite daughter, exactly, but he had been the only person capable of handling the teenage girl in the years before she vanished. Teddy had certainly relied on him to help protect her from her volatile elder sister:

When she did shake me awake so that she could yell at me for some perceived slight, some way that I thought I was better than her or ignored her at school or whatever, I would tune it out and wish for Dad. And most of the time, he heard me calling for him in my head. Most of the time, he was there within a minute or two to whisk Angie downstairs for a pot of coffee and a serious talk and a lot of crying.

 

Mom thought he was too soft, too sympathetic. She thought Angie was getting caught on purpose, so that she could get his attention.

Dad and Angie had both suffered from substance abuse issues, a problem that was only exacerbated for Dad after Angie went missing. Teddy had known that her father was damaged, but only discovers the extent of his grief after Clare asks her for help sorting through his personal effects and their bills. Teddy is horrified to discover how broke her mother is now, and mystified by the puzzling expenses her father had incurred before he died. As she seeks to close his accounts and make life easier for her mother, she finds that he had been involved with various online communities still seeking answers as to what might have happened to Angie.

Unable to resist carrying on his work, Teddy starts calling the numbers on his burner phone and making posts on the websites he frequented. Her inquiries soon bring her not only to a romantic entanglement with a figure from her past, but also into the orbit of a disarmingly quirky teenager named Mickey, who reminds her uncomfortably of Angie. And while, at first, her sleuthing is in service of her father’s memory, she quickly comes to the realization that this is all her way of dealing with her still unresolved anguish over both his death and Angie’s disappearance. At least she knows why her father died. No one in her family has yet been able to figure out what happened to Angie and why.

Because of this, Teddy is still tormented by her memories of her sister, and by her own actions ten years prior:

Other times—most of the time—I felt good about keeping Angie’s meaningless secrets. Angie—I would think, back when I still almost-prayed to her—Ange, I told them next to nothing. And in my prayers, she would pat my head appreciatively. I imagined her coming back and realizing how seriously I took our confidence. I imagined us growing closer than we’d ever been. Angie taking me seriously. Both of us in our twenties, in our thirties—best friends. Angie realizing that I was the only one who cared about who she was. The two of us living like sisters in a movie, laughing and giggling in the daylight together, crying with each other at night.

Haunted as much by the loss of her sister as an actuality as she is by the loss of her sister as a possibility, Teddy is driven to make increasingly risky choices in her pursuit of the truth. But when her own survival is at stake, will Teddy be able to prioritize her present instead of chasing after a shadowed past or a fantasy future that looks ever less likely with each of her impulsive moves?

Pensive and grave, Rabbit Hole examines how the Internet allows the emotionally unstable to not only escape from reality but also to find community, for better or worse. Instead of processing her grief, Teddy allows modern technology to distract her with hits of dopamine, in much the same way that older generations used mind-altering substances or other dissociative devices to cope with their pain. While this book doesn’t provide definitive answers as to what happened to Angie, the aftereffects of her disappearance are clearly outlined, with both unflinching realism and an almost painful level of empathy. Teddy is a disaster, but she’s also very human and vivid, the perfectly portrayed protagonist of this dark psychological thriller.