This time it’s not Lewis Carroll’s Alice but 26-year-old old Theodora (Teddy) Angstrom who plummets headlong into first-time novelist Kate Brody’s propulsive social media–infused literary thriller, “Rabbit Hole.” Brody hits the ground running with an immediately absorbing double whammy of an opening sentence: “Ten years to the day after my sister’s disappearance, my father kills himself.” From there, you won’t be able to put the novel down until its equally startling closing words.
“Rabbit Hole” By Kate Brody Soho, 384 pages $25.95 Teddy teaches English at a prestigious prep school on the atmospheric Maine coast. One of her favorite reading selections is “The Dead,” the final short story in James Joyce’s collection, “The Dubliners.
” She connects the dismal snow that covers everything in Joyce’s story to Maine’s “ceaseless rain.” It lends a kind of “paralysis” to her emotional state, increasing her own grief and depression over her lost sibling and parent and sending her into a tailspin of angst and paranoia. Her state of mind makes her a prime candidate for the addictive “depersonalization” of the online conspiratorial doxxing community of Reddit.
Teddy becomes progressively immersed in the dangerous platform as she tries to sort out the unsolved case of her missing older sister, Angie, and the probable reasons for her father, Mark, taking his own life, driving “his car through the rotting barn wall of the most beautiful bri.