Emily Austin’s We Could Be Rats is a darkly funny, deeply tender novel about sisterhood, survival, and the strange inner worlds people build when real life feels too painful to hold.
At its center, the book follows Sigrid and Margit, two sisters whose bond is shaped by love, resentment, fear, and a lifetime of being misunderstood.
We Could Be Rats tells a story about growing up without losing your imagination and about how family can wound you while still giving you a way back to yourself.
The book explores grief, mental illness, and the pressure to seem fine, while returning to humor, memory, and the small acts that make repair possible.
Readers who enjoyed Emily Austin’s earlier fiction, especially Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, will recognize the same sharp emotional intelligence and uneasy balance between pain and wit.
Here, the sibling relationship gives the story its strongest pull, and the result feels intimate, raw, and quietly hopeful.
What The Book Is About
The story is set in Drysdale, a conservative town that mirrors the emotional pressure closing in on the sisters.
The narrative moves through Sigrid’s suicide notes and memories, then shifts into Margit’s shaken perspective after the attempt, creating a portrait of a family that has long struggled to name its pain.
Premise And Setting
Sigrid tells much of the story through a series of evolving suicide note drafts, each one revealing more about her sense of alienation.
Drysdale feels stifling, judgmental, and resistant to anyone who does not fit its rules.
That pressure shapes every relationship in the book, from the sisters’ home life to the social world around them.
The town becomes part of the emotional trap.
Why Sigrid Resists Growing Up
Sigrid clings to the imaginative freedom of childhood because adulthood feels like a narrowing of the self.
She remembers basement games, invented identities, and the sense that she could become a troll, a rat, or a magician.
Growing up asks her to accept limits, labels, and expectations she cannot bear.
Her resistance is less a refusal to mature than a refusal to disappear into a life that never really fits.
How Margit Sees The Same World Differently
Margit looks at the same family and town through a more controlled lens.
She tries to hold everything together, which makes her a foil to Sigrid’s rebellion.
Where Sigrid escapes into fantasy, Margit absorbs responsibility and keeps going.
That difference gives the sisters both friction and tenderness, because each one is trying to survive the same damaged world in a different way.
Major Themes And Emotional Core
The emotional force of the book comes from the way it links private pain to shared history.
Sisterhood, imagination, and grief sit beside each other, and the novel treats them as inseparable parts of the same wound.
Sisterhood And Misunderstanding
Sigrid and Margit love each other, yet they rarely know how to say it cleanly.
Their bond is shaped by comparison, disappointment, and the ache of wanting to be recognized.
That tension makes their relationship feel honest.
Sibling love can be protective and painful at once, especially when one sister keeps order and the other keeps truth.
Childhood Imagination As Survival
Imagination serves as a survival tool.
Sigrid’s inner life is filled with strange images and playful transformations, and that creativity helps her endure what reality refuses to soften.
The book works like a love letter to childhood, not because childhood is simple, but because it offers freedom before the world hardens around you.
That power of imagination becomes a quiet protest against despair.
Grief, Addiction, And Suicide Notes
Grief in the novel is tangled with addiction, social cruelty, and the aftermath of loss.
Greta’s struggle with opioid addiction leaves a lasting mark, and Sigrid’s suicide notes become the form through which she tries to make sense of everything she cannot otherwise explain.
Those notes reveal how language can fail, repeat, contradict itself, and still reach for connection.
The book treats even a suicide note as a desperate kind of love letter to childhood, memory, and the people left behind.
Emily Austin’s Style And Literary Context
Emily Austin uses dark humor to keep the book from becoming emotionally flat.
That balance makes the novel memorable.
The voice can feel unstable on purpose, which lets you sit inside contradiction instead of smoothing it away.
Dark Humor And Unreliable Feeling
Austin writes with a style that keeps shifting between absurdity and pain.
That unstable tone reflects how trauma and humor often coexist in the same mind.
Because the narration is fragmented and emotionally reactive, you never fully escape the sisters’ distress.
The result feels personal, jagged, and unusually immediate.
How It Compares With Earlier Books
Fans of Interesting Facts About Space and Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead will recognize Austin’s interest in outsiders, emotional awkwardness, and the comedy hidden inside dread.
We Could Be Rats feels like a more intimate sibling story, with the same sympathy for people who do not know how to fit neatly into the world.
It also carries the confidence of a bestselling author who knows how to mix grief with wit.
That blend gives the book its distinctive shape.
Who Will Connect Most With This Story
You will connect most with this novel if you like emotionally intense fiction that still leaves room for humor, memory, and tenderness.
Readers who appreciate Laurie Frankel’s attention to family dynamics or Mo’s quieter emotional register may also find a lot to hold onto here.
If you want a story about sisterhood, mental health, and the stubborn power of imagination, this one will stay with you.
It speaks most strongly to anyone who has ever felt too strange, too sensitive, or too hard to explain.
