Rabbit Cake

As March faded into April, and with April 1st being Easter, it seemed fitting that I read a book about rabbits.  Because surely a book called Rabbit Cake with a bunny on the cover is about rabbits, right?
No, not really (and no I didn't really think that), but Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett was a story that grabbed me and didn't let go.

Elvis's mom bakes rabbit cakes to celebrate special occasions.  The first day of school, new moons, birthdays.  She says a rabbit meant good luck to a new start.  But on Elvis's 10th birthday Mom burned the rabbit cake.

Six months later she sleepwalked into a river and drowned.

Elvis is a smart girl.  She knows a lot about animals.  But what she doesn't know is how her mom's death could have been an accident.

While her dad starts wearing her mom's clothes and lipsticks, and her older sister starts sleep-eating instead of sleepwalking, Elvis tries to find any good reason her mom would have killed herself.
Over the next 18 months, she tries to cope with her own grief and her families grief in the only way she knows how.

Rabbit Cake is a coming of age story which is heartwarming, heartbreaking and humorous in all the right ways.  I would love to see a sequel story centered around this family.

MAKING A RABBIT CAKE

Over 1000 Rabbit cakes were baked, eaten, judged or destroyed in this book.  While some were left plain, some were fanciful and some were decorated to look like real rabbits.  Elvis tells us on the first page of the novel:

A rabbit cake is baked in a two-sided aluminum mold, producing a three-dimensional cake.  That's the miracle of it: the cake stands up on its own, on its four paws.

I pictured them as looking a lot like this cake pan available from Amazon:
I've never made one before, but maybe we should all start celebrating the new beginnings, or even the daily mundane tasks, of our lives with Rabbit Cakes.

Rabbit Cake is the 18th book out of the 60 I hope to read this year.  See Everything I've read on my 2018 Reading List

Is A Quiet Place a Rip-off?

I've been seeing previews for a while now of a movie called A Quiet Place.  Due to be released in theaters on April 6th, I have not had a chance to see it yet.

However, since the very first time I saw the preview something about this movie has bugged me to no end.


In the preview we see a family which must be very, very quiet at all times.  Because there is something out there that hunts them if they make a sound.  Any sound.

I kept thinking, "I've read that book!"  But I couldn't think of the name of the book.

So tonight I went digging on the internet and found out that "A Quiet Place" isn't based on a book.
A Quiet Place is about a family trying to survive in a world that is post-apocalypse.  A creature hunts them if they make a sound.  And looking further into it turns out that one of the children is deaf so the family already knew sign language and all that good stuff to give them a small but slightly better chance at knowing how to survive in silence.

Nothing about it being based on a book though, which confused me because I KNOW the story.  I READ the story.  But I couldn't remember the name of it.  So I kept typing what I remembered of the story into google until I found it.


In the novel, The Silence by Tim Lebbon (published in April of 2015) havoc has been wreaked on the world by creatures which.... hunt by sound!

It follows a family trying to survive in a world where they are being hunted by creatures who hunt by sound.  The slightest sound means death.  Also, and huge surprise here, the daughter in the story is deaf, so the family knows sign language and has the ability to communicate in silence already.

Judging by what little we see of the creature in the preview for A Quiet Place it is vastly different from the Vesps (the winged creatures who hunt the family in The Silence), but the rest of the story appears too close to the novel for the novel to have not gotten credit.

In some communication on the author's page I see I am not the only person who feels uncomfortable with how similar they film and the novel are.  The author says he is aware of the film and he also  says:

Hi Folks … thanks for your comments and concerns. There are similarities, of course, but I’m confident that the movie of The Silence will stand on its own. It’s going to be epic!
It is a little troubling, but I guess that’s all I can say about it.

Meanwhile, The Silence itself is in pre-production.  Yep, it's being turned into a movie.

I can see it now though when The Silence comes out in film version a whole bunch of people are going to be angry because they are going to be SURE that it's ripping off A Quiet Place.

What do you think? Coincidence or not?

I guess I'll have to wait until I see the film to pass final judgment, but that preview sure does make it feel fishy to me.