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A "one-sitting-read" (Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author) about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination-from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.
Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid's inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.
But Sigrid's detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She's haunted by the pains of her past-from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta's friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.
"A must read" (Haley Jakobson, New York Times Editor's Choice author), We Could Be Rats is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.
About the author
Emily Austin is the author of
We Could Be Rats,
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead,
Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection
Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada, and received two writing grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.
Report
"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." -LAURIE FRANKEL, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is
