The Sound of Rabbits

""Janice Deal's The Sound of Rabbits is a lyrical, deeply affecting novel about family, loss, and the ties that bind us to the places we're from, even when we think we've left them behind. After Ruby gets a call notifying her that her chronically ill mother has taken a turn for the worse, she heads to the small Midwestern town where her sister, old flame, and memories of her past live on. Using multiple points of view, Deal immerses us into a vividly-rendered town in which the residents share their deepest secrets, while asking us to consider: how to live joyfully, knowing we'll eventually say goodbye to those we've loved, and those who have loved us the most. That question, along with Deal's elegant prose and memorable characters, ensures that The Sound of Rabbits resonates long after the final page.""--Marcie Roman, author of Journey to the Parallels ""The Sound of Rabbits is a heartfelt novel of fragile love between sisters, estranged through distance and grudges, striving to find their bond, even if they don't have the words to express it. With keen insights and spot-on descriptions, Janice Deal animates her novel with characters from a small town in Wisconsin where parents struggle to make ends meet, children seek their passions, nature is cruel, and the past is never really past. An unflinching, yet loving, portrait of a complicated family."" --Jan English Leary, author of Thicker Than Blood and Skating on the Vertical ""At the heart of Janice Deal's new novel The Sound of Rabbits are two sisters: one who stayed and one who fled. Val, in a sad marriage with two daughters, remained in their small hometown, and Ruby, who got away, hides her disappointments and failures. The two are brought together as their mother approaches death. Re-enacting old conflicts and finding new ones, each woman seeks solace from the other, and refuses it. Deal weaves together the two sisters' stories, present and past, with those of their mother, Val's girls, Val's silent husband Len, and others they touch in their small town, creating a luminous web in which each interwoven life is a strand that sets the entire web shaking and shimmering. ""I read The Sound of Rabbits with a growing sense of recognition and love for Ruby, her family, and the others in her orbit. As in her past and forthcoming work, Janice Deal tenderly nurtures the bonds between reader and character with her great empathy and keen understanding of what it means to be alive. In The Sound of Rabbits, Deal offers a moving portrait of one family's hopes, disappointments, and sorrows in a voice that is unflinching, achingly poignant, and unforgettable."" --Katherine Shonk, author of The Red Passport and Happy Now? With a lovingly sharp-eyed grasp of the particularities of small town northern Wisconsin, with an uncanny ability to probe the dark and conflicted interiors of her characters, and a poet's way of conjuring layers of emotion with a few perfect words, Deal has written a novel that resonates long after the last lines are read. The Sound of Rabbits is a deeply affecting and powerful novel."" --Lynn Sloan, author of Midstream, Principles of Navigation, and This Far Isn't Far Enough