When God was a Rabbit is founded upon, and sculpted by, the use of detail: the love of fried eggs well done and blended Scotch; boat shoes and collarless shirts; Oxford over Cambridge. It is made up of the intolerability of nuts and raisins in chocolate and the gap between front teeth that occurs when playing rugby; the pleasure in avocados but not with mayonnaise; and any ice cream but strawberry. The novel does not consist of a particularly awe-inspiring plot, nor does it contain too-unexpected turns in the story’s trajectory. Rather, it is made up of particular emphases and pauses; certain rhythms that make the words tangible for one brief moment. And in that moment, an everyday word sounds different. It rolls on the tongue with an unfamiliar momentum, and one tastes it like it has never been tasted before: piqued and intensified. Through these words and this chain of little intricacies, the story is woven. It ceases to be a narrative read off a page—it becomes an active, living entity, swirling the reader up in its magnanimity— in its reality. In Sarah Winman’s When God was a Rabbit, the sensation of life rolls on the tongue with an unfamiliar momentum. Through the novel we newly seek life’s pleasures and experience its disappointments. It is not a groundbreaking book, by any means. But it is real and heartfelt and, as a result, holds an exponentially more relatable story.

The back cover of the novel states the following in describing the story, “It’s a book about childhood and growing up, friendships and families, triumph and tragedy and everything in between. More than anything, it’s a book about love in all its forms.” To be honest, I bought it because of that: because it intrigued me that no other description detailing the story seemed adequate enough. Because, upon reading the novel, one realizes that it couldn’t ever be enough. No description quite lives up to any standards, when detailing the little things in life.

The novel tells the story of a brother and sister, Eleanor (Elly) and Joe Maude, and describes both the togetherness and the estrangement that characterize their relationship through the former’s eyes. For Elly, the connection with her brother is based on the statement, “I am here but I am not yours” (131). The novel illuminates the relationship, and the lives that it touches with a childlike innocence and clarity. Through Elly, one experiences the marital struggle between parents, the sadistic measure found in adult worlds, and the extremely weird, psychic, awkward best friend who influences most of Elly’s life. The book is an easy read—it does not have the reader pondering for many moments on one excruciating word, the meaning of which seems vital to the story. The absorption of text is quick and light, but hits the reader hard; my eyes were red and puffy upon completing it. I looked like I had experienced the sob of my life; I decline to acknowledge if this statement is definitely true or false.

Perhaps the reason I loved the book so much is because I find this appreciation of little things terribly rare in the ‘ground-breaking’ culture that stories’ themes are keen to adopt; there is the lack of moments that, in the course of history, lose their significance. But that in the instances of them happening, are heart-stopping, and world-ending at the same time; the ones filled with giddy laughter and breathlessness. Winman seems to love these temporal roller coasters and intricate quirks. And so we see Ginger mortifyingly high on an overdose of medical marijuana at a church baptism, the ironic kind of lesbian love that links wife and sister-in-law, and the need for sexual reassurance that one yearns for in the face of immense loss. In an exquisite moment, we see a young Elly voluntarily changing thousands of years of Christianity by leading Mary and Joseph “towards a double en-suite TV and mini bar” (47)—I stopped breathing from laughing too hard. In typical British style, Winman uses subtlety, irony and wit magically. It is an understated, wry humour that tugs at heartstrings and aches in spleens. The novel shows the need to cling to another person as an arbitrator and mediator in life, “to remind the world that we’re special and that we’re still here” (115); the ache to re-experience instances that childhood is abundant with, and that adult life makes cynical.

The novel makes one remember why understanding a child’s perspective is unique and clarifying. It is, more often than not, right, because it gets to the very essence of the problem; the heartbreak of the matter; the loss of belief in a situation; the heady feeling of champagne and martinis; the elation of love. Through a child’s perspective, and then a twenty-something adult’s one, we see in clear, unpretentious and smooth writing, the world of the siblings. We experience an adolescent’s first heartbreak, the renunciation of love forever, and the finding of it again. We experience regret and guilt in all its forms. We sigh together with the characters at the thought of growing up too quickly, and we pause for a moment twenty years into the story, and wonder where that childhood went, “when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit” (269).

This book cannot be appreciated and experienced in detached pieces; a page, or a paragraph, does not necessarily give one enlightenment. Much like a life, it needs to be appreciated in its entirety—as a process of development rather than a singular destination. To fully understand, one needs to skim the novel again after reading, as if reliving the life in memories, and actively join together and connect the incidents and references. Like so much in life, moments in the novel have particular significances in them only when one looks back. The ending is not profound— the story is based on a series of little plots rather than a massive secret to be uncovered and there is no profound didacticism that reveals itself. But it does leave one with a feeling of catharsis; it brings back the feeling of childhood being shed, and an adult’s world intruding too quickly into one’s privacy. It takes one back to the moment of innocence lost and the experience of the strange boundaries that exist in family life. The words tease and pull, encouraging one moment and backing away the next. It is a story about people and their quirks. To paraphrase another touching line in the novel, Elly never felt complete without Joe. In truth, she never would (7). “This is a book about a brother and a sister” and the bond that, somehow, never extinguishes with love of any kind.