It’s a whole lot of plot - “I wanted to challenge myself,” Hartnett says with serious understatement - but the author’s vivid imagination and empathetic writing style ensure that every character and element get their due. The layers to the story are rich and multifaceted, to say the least: Parts of the book are narrated by the ghosts of Everton’s cemetery, there’s a missing-person case, Emma may or may not have healing powers, and the opioid crisis is wreaking havoc across town. I’m a writer that follows my obsessions, and I’m a person that gets obsessed.

The substitute teacher she imagined all those years ago became Emma Starling, a burned-out 20-something who comes home to her fictional hometown of Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her dying father - a man who happens to be hallucinating the long-dead naturalist and various wild animals.

The Doctor Dolittle-like figure who was the park’s naturalist, among other intriguing bits of trivia, gripped Hartnett, and by the summer of 2018, she’d managed to find a way to tie all the threads of her work together. She did more research, spending a considerable amount of time at the local historical society diving deeper into the area’s backstory. “Even though I was writing this book about kids and a teacher set in 2014, I was obsessed with this park,” Hartnett recalls. When she learned that it had been the home of an 1800s robber baron who built a 26,000-acre hunting park behind it with animals shipped in from all over the world, she started to realize what had been missing from her story. That all changed when Hartnett happened upon an enormous mansion in Newport, New Hampshire. Hartnett knew she wanted to incorporate the substitute teacher and her students whom she envisioned, but it wasn’t quite clicking. Yet despite Rabbit Cake’s success, Hartnett couldn’t stop thinking about the other book she’d started at grad school. The witty, whimsical novel about a preteen girl grieving her mother’s death earned rave reviews and prestigious award nominations after its release, and there’s even a movie version, set to star Mckenna Grace, currently in the works from Amazon Studios. Upon graduation, however, she put the latter work aside to focus solely on Rabbit Cake, finishing the book in stints at the library and the Massachusetts bookstore where she worked. At the time, Hartnett was working steadily on Rabbit Cake while also musing on a new novel about a fifth-grade substitute teacher. It’s a tricky balance that the Rhode Island-based author has been honing since her days as an MFA student at the University of Alabama a decade ago.

Unlikely animals book