Annie Hartnett Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of AnnieHartnett Standalone Novels
Rabbit Cake | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Unlikely Animals | (2022) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
America's Most Haunted Courthouse | (2022) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Sea Lion | (2022) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Annie Hartnett
Annie Harnett is a 2013 graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alabama, and was the 2013-2014 Writer in Residence for the Associates of the Boston Public Library. She teaches classes on the novel and short story at Grub Street, an independent writing center in Boston.
“Rabbit Cake” has been selected as a People Magazine Book of the Week, an Indie Next Pick and an Indies Introduce, and has gotten starred reviews from Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus.
“Rabbit Cake” is the result of a lot of different inspirations for the elements of the novel. She is a bit of a patchwork writer that takes every part of life which interest her and work them together. The novel was originally about sleepwalking, and how odd that is as a phenomenon, and maybe this was the initial idea, however Elvis came alive immediately after Annie made her obsessed with animals. She is also a big animal lover and has worked quite a few animal centered jobs in the past.
In “Unlikely Animals”, she introduces the ghosts with their birthday and death day, which is the result of her living in a cemetery. She lived in a cemetery before she ever really had the idea to write a book set in the cemetery. She lived in a groundskeeper’s house with her dog Harvey, who she walked everyday. And as she was waiting for him to do his business, she read the gravestones each day. She was always trying to pay close attention to when people lived and died in order to just think about them.
Annie was just a baby writer trying to think about stories all the time. So this was something that she wanted to do since it was a part of their names, it is right there.
Annie realized that if the dead people in the town were able to actually hear people’s thoughts that she could have a lot of fun with that. Pretty early on she had Moses the dog’s perspective, at one point there was an entire chapter, but her editor or agent said that it was too much dog. However it took her a long time, until after she had been editing for a while, to think, why doesn’t the fox have a point of view, since it was so easy for her to pop into the dog’s head.
The dog, obviously, gets to a new field and thinks great place and smells wonderful. But the fox was more like, there is a fox and he does all these crazy things, yet you’re never going to know what he’s thinking about. Then she realized that, of course, she could also get his point of view and wouldn’t that be fun to have the point of view of some animal that is half domesticated and half wild. Annie always goes way too far and winds up having to edit things back. So the fox is originally from Russia, which where there are domesticated foxes. And so this fox originally showed up speaking a bunch of Russian swear words.
“Rabbit Cake” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2017. This is a darkly comic book about a young girl named Elvis attempting to find her place in a world without her mom.
Elvis Babbitt, twelve years old, has got a head for the facts: she knows that a healthy male giraffe weighs roughly 3,000 pounds, she knows science proves that yellow is the happiest color, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent.
She knows that she should really plan on grieving her mom, who recently drowned while she was sleepwalking, for precisely eighteen months. However there are some things Elvis does not yet know, like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself as she’s sleep eating or why her dad would start wearing her mom’s silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the odd circumstances of her mom’s death and finds some comfort, if not too many answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama.
This is a fantastically original novel, and she became a favorite author as a result of this book.
“Unlikely Animals” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2022. One lost young woman returns to small town New Hampshire under the oddest of circumstances in this one-of-a-kind novel about death, life, and whatever comes after.
It was a source of entertainment at Maple Street Cemetery. Both sad and funny, the sort of story we like the best.
Emma Starling, a natural born healer, once had major plans for her life, however she has lost her way. A medical school dropout, she has returned to Everton, New Hampshire, in order to care for her dad, who’s dying from this mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating tiny animals, and has been having visions of the ghost of this long deceased naturalist. Ernest Harold Baynes, who was once known for allowing wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some good ideas about how he can spend his last days.
Emma shows up back home knowing that she has to face her father’s illness, her mother’s judgment, and her little brother’s recent stint in rehab, however she is unprepared to find that her old best friend from high school has gone missing, without anybody bothering to go and look for her. The cops say that they do not spend all that much time looking for drug addicts. Emma’s father is the only one that is convinced the young lady may still be alive, and Emma is hopeful he could be right. Somebody should look for her, at least. Emma’s not really attempting to be a hero, however somehow she and her dad bring about just the sort of miracle this town really needs.
Set against the backdrop of a tiny town in the throes of a horrible opioid crisis, this is a tragicomic book about imperfect friendships, familial expectations, and the possibility of resurrecting that which had been thought to be irrevocably lost.
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