The Burrow

August 27, 2024
A triumph of restrained and tender storytelling, Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow follows a Melbourne family living on autopilot five years after a senseless tragedy. Amy, Jin and Lucie have since each developed their own coping strategies: Amy has emotionally withdrawn and is unable to work on her next book; Jin, her husband, has become superstitious and possibly unfaithful; and Lucie, their isolated daughter, struggles with intrusive thoughts of a violent nature. Their dynamic subtly shifts when Amy and Jin get Lucie a pet rabbit to keep her company at the same time as Amy’s mother, Pauline, comes to stay. The rabbit, named Fiver after a character in Watership Down and whom Pauline and Lucie bond over, becomes a symbol for the long-unspoken tensions in the family and a prism refracting their anxieties. In this way, The Burrow recalls the similarly meditative novel The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Both works explore how pets reflect our inner selves in mysterious and existentially fraught ways while gifting us much-needed levity and sweetness. The Burrow is a nuanced study of one family’s grief, but it’s also a magnificent portrait of modern loneliness. Through the alternating points of view of her well-defined characters, Cheng (Room for a Stranger, Australia Day) evokes how we get stuck in lonely orbits around each other and charts with well-earned hope one family’s slow progress back toward a common world again.

September 1, 2024
A kaleidoscope of grief, The Burrow illuminates the multifaceted patterns of loss that become imprinted in our daily lives, sense of self, and understanding of each other. Set in an Australian suburb, Cheng's novel details the isolating fragmentation of an interracial family--the parents, their surviving young daughter, and the grandmother--after the untimely death of the other daughter. While the novel is written from multiple perspectives, Cheng's choice to center the narrative around the family's care of a new pet rabbit skillfully brings coherence to its explorations of compassion, commitment, and suffering. Through restrained and subtle writing that never reveals too much, this novel entices readers to recognize grief's paradoxically discreet nature, hiding in plain sight while screaming loudly into silence. Cheng's setting of the novel during the COVID-19 pandemic--where social separation was not only the norm, but a method of protection--adds further complexity to its exploration of how familial intimacy both creates and consumes pain. The Burrow is suitable for those interested in becoming intimate with grief itself.

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September 9, 2024
A Melbourne family struggles to move on four years after their baby’s death in the penetrating latest from Cheng (Room for a Stranger). Hoping to lighten the mood for their 10-year-old daughter, Lucie, Jin and Amy Lee get her a pet rabbit. Initially, the rabbit proves a welcome distraction, but then Amy’s estranged mother, Pauline, arrives after breaking her wrist, and the family’s tenuous harmony is undermined. Through flashbacks, Cheng hints at the circumstances of the baby’s death at six months, suggesting that Pauline bore some responsibility. Meanwhile, Pauline is struck by the family’s stagnation: the backyard is riddled with detritus from a partially completed home improvement project, and Amy seems to be incapable of providing the necessary emotional support to sensitive Lucie. To make matters worse, the Covid-19 pandemic keeps everyone but Jin, an ER doctor, housebound. Eventually, each character’s bond with the rabbit proves restorative, and a crisis point involving a break-in nudges them further along the path toward recovery. Cheng shrewdly portrays the impact of the tragedy on each family member. Readers will be moved.