Summary

In a brief sort-of prologue before Part 1 begins, an unnamed female narrator reveals that on her tenth birthday, her mother burned her rabbit cake--a cake baked in a rabbit-shaped pan that stood up on its feet when complete, and which the narrator’s mother baked on all special occasions for good luck. Six months after this, the narrator’s mother sleepwalked into the Chattahoochee river and drowned. The night before the drowning, she had baked a rabbit cake for the summer solstice. The narrator believes her mother’s death to be “unexplained” (3), since her mother was a scientist and not prone to making careless mistakes.

In August, two months after she drowned, the narrator’s mother surfaces in Georgia, 12 miles from Freedom, Alabama where the narrator lives with her father Frank, sister Lizzie, and border collie Boomer. The narrator shares that she is...