Published in 2021
321 pages
Melanie Finn was born and raised in Kenya and the US. She is author of four critically acclaimed “literary thrillers,” Away From You (2004), The Gloaming (2016), The Underneath (2018) and The Hare (2021). While working in a remote area of Tanzania as the writer and producer of the DisneyNature flamigo epic, The Crimson Wing, she founded Natron Healthcare, a small charity focused on bringing health education and health service to under resourced communities in that area. She lives with her husband, the wildlife filmmaker Matt Aeberhard, and their twin daughters on a mountainside in northern Vermont.
What is this book about?
The Hare is an affecting portrait of Rosie Monroe, of her resilience and personal transformation under the pin of the male gaze.
Raised to be obedient by a stern grandmother in a blue-collar town in Massachusetts, Rosie accepts a scholarship to art school in New York City in the 1980s. One morning at a museum, she meets a worldly man twenty years her senior, with access to the upper crust of New England society. Bennett is dashing, knows that “polo” refers only to ponies, teaches her which direction to spoon soup, and tells of exotic escapades with Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson. Soon, Rosie is living with him on a swanky estate on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, naively in sway to his moral ambivalence. A daughter—Miranda—is born, just as his current con goes awry forcing them to abscond in the middle of the night to the untamed wilderness of northern Vermont.
Almost immediately, Bennett abandons them in an uninsulated cabin without a car or cash for weeks at a time so he can work a teaching job, that may or may not exist, at an elite college. Rosie is forced to care for her young daughter alone and to tackle the stubborn intricacies of the wood stove, snowshoe into town, hunt for wild game, and forage in the forest. As Rosie and Miranda’s life gradually begins to normalize, Bennett’s schemes turn malevolent, and Rosie must at last confront his twisted deceptions.
