If you need a good laugh and a good cry, pick this book up. Emily Austin masterfully marries tragedy with the poignantly ludicrous in this raw novel. Sigrid wants to die: fed up with her dissatisfying job, grieving the loss of her best friend, lamenting her heavy family dynamic, and feeling generally like growing up was probably the wrong move, we get to know her through a series of notes. With a mix of longing for that specific flavor of childhood joy, parsing out her feelings about her sister, and explaining her deepest desires and regrets; Sigrid wishes to be a rat at a carnival feasting on fried food scraps and running around with reckless abandon. A life that free doesn’t feel entirely possible, but maybe, just maybe, we could be rats.
–Bianca, Annie Bloom’s Books, Portland, OR
Looking for some cathartic books? Annie Bloom’s and other independent bookstores can help!
Bonus recommendation from Seattle, WA author Laurie Frankel:
“Emily Austin’s latest is a masterclass in voice, unreliable narrators, and unknowable characters you get to know anyway because their small town and weird family and struggles with the world are so recognizable and so intimately detailed. We Could Be Rats is a one-sitting-read portrait of the complicated relationship between two sisters, unusual but familiar, moving but difficult, and, ultimately, the light in the darkness they each — and we too — so badly need.”
