I really enjoyed the author's exploration of all the characters that live in Vacca Vale at this "rabbit hutch" apartment complex. Her writing was quirky and funny at times too.

I loved getting to know all of these characters and all of their weird quirks, what makes them them. I have seen this book be compared to more of a short story collection with the characters connected and I have to agree. I think i would have liked it more if it was a bit more cohesive.

As you can imagine, this novel caught my eye at the mere mention of a run-down Indiana town. Having grown up in a town of exactly 315 residents (according to the 2010 census, at least) in middle-Indiana, surrounded by failing factories and struggling blue-collar families, I was both intrigued by this premise, and admittedly, eager to judge it. And, tldr; it did not fall short of my expectations.

Vacca Vale, though fictional, is a setting that's apt to look incredibly familiar to Midwestern natives, particularly those in crumbling towns that were once minor industrial hubs. Personally, it was refreshing to read a work that hit so close to home, especially when the next best thing is watching "Stranger Things", which, though set in Indiana, was filmed in Atlanta and feels like nothing familiar. I could picture Vacca Vale with an intense accuracy beyond what was simply being described in this already visceral work, and because the physical setting is so vital, this made for an incredibly enthralling read.

<i>The Rabbit Hutch</i> is a very cyclical work, to its (at least in my opinion) great credit. It almost prepares the audience for a sadness that never quite occurs, allowing the light tinge of melancholy to simply linger untouched, as it does for most of fictional Vacca Vale's residents and for the reader, too, long after the book itself is closed.

This work is also very self-referential, returning again and again to certain points in a way that shadows them just enough to keep from making these references startlingly obvious, and has a Station Eleven-esque way of flitting from character to character, seemingly unconnected, before letting the audience in on the joke: they were all intertwined all along. Time is very fluid here, too, and while there are days and times mentioned, they are nearly irrelevant to the story as a whole and leaves the reader with the sense of walking through a strange and never-ending dream. To be clear, I fully mean this as a high compliment. While none of this is exactly a new concept in literary fiction, it is a concept I enjoy when done well, as it was here.

One of the major themes of the novel is the idea that there is no such thing as a moral activity, and the subsequent contemplations of moral vs. immoral actions. Again, not a new consideration, but I enjoyed the author's take on it throughout the narrative's journey. The main character strives to right injustice to consider her own existence ethical. A jilted son attempts to validate his hatred of his mother, and the person it has turned him into. A crew of teenage boys lack communication skills in any way that isn't violence, which feels both unsettling and familiar. Nothing is justified, and yet everything is explained, even if the explanation is the very true-to-life result of emotional instability that occurs as the negative emotions build uninhibited and unexamined over time. It is a very human and very relatable way of approaching the existence of this town and its inhabitants.

My one qualm with this work is that it truly isn't anything new. Tess Gunty is an extremely talented writer with a flair for landscape, setting, ambience, moral considerations, and generally weaving together a compelling tale of life and death and everything in-between, but there were some repeated tropes here that felt recycled. Blandine's character, while intriguing, is a textbook manic pixie dream girl archetype. I could have done without the teacher-student relationship, and the idea of paying more attention to one another and the ways our stories intersect has been a hot topic in literary fiction lately as well. Again, I was enthralled with this work from start to finish and read it nearly in a single sitting, but this is entirely due to Gunty's storytelling and encompassing lyricism and not anything to do with the narrative itself.

That said, this is a debut novel and I am excited to see what else Gunty will produce in the future! Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for providing an ARC (though I read it post-release, oops) in exchange for an honest review, and to Tess Gunty for putting more honest literature about the strange and shadowed world that is small-town Indiana into the world! I would recommend this for fans of The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, as it strikes somewhere in the dead center of where those three oddly intersect. I will definitely be purchasing this title for the store, and recommending it to our customers!

This is the brand of the off-the-walls bizarre cast of characters weird lit I am into, in the vein of Moshfegh, Kushner, and other sad-girl fleabag writers who are very "in" right now. I enjoyed the characters and was intrigued by their backstories, and felt like, as an ensemble, they each complemented one another very well.

overall i really enjoyed this debut, and Gunty is definitely an author to keep an eye out for as the writing is the highlight of the book. the reason i didn’t LOVE this one as much as i wanted to was that i wish it focused more on Blandine, I was really captivated by her character and found myself sighing everytime the next chapter would focus on a different character because I wanted more of her!

A novel about a girl and other residents of an apartment complex ("The Rabbit Hutch") in a Rust Belt town. Blandine is an 18 year-old former foster kid obsessed with the she-mystics who wants to save the local nature preserve from development. She lives amongst a cast of other broken characters living in a town whose glory days are long past. It is a messy sprawl of a novel that highlights the costs of living in a city that feels abandoned. Maybe it's the rabbit connection, but the prose reminded me of Mona Awad's Bunny. It has a similar propulsive, ebullient, almost absurdist quality to it, although the ending in this one is less bonkers. Not all the sub-stories hung together for me, but I admired the ambition of this novel and came to care about the fates of the residents of The Rabbit Hutch and the town of Vacca Vale.

This story describes the coming and goings of a handful of different characters that live in the same building complex, nicknamed The Rabbit Hutch.

This was a difficult read for me. I couldn’t get into the writing as it felt way too sophisticated for me to understand what it was trying to convey. I didn’t appreciate any of the side characters for there were bouts of stories I didn’t care to hear about. The main character had a spark of something I was starting to like, but it never manifested. I didn’t understand the ending. I didn’t understand what the author wanted to tell me. Although, I did appreciate the uniqness of her writing technique expressing the true realities humans face daily.

I hate to say it, but this one just wasn’t for me.

The Rabbit Hutch is a strange, meandering novel that will definitely hit the mark for a niche group of readers. Luckily for me, I am in that group!

There is not a straightforward plot. Rather, there are many stories spanning a handful of characters that don’t necessarily have to do with each other. The novel wants us to consider how strange it is to live in close proximity with so many people, while often knowing very little about those around us. Gunty accomplished this by utilizing a small, rundown apartment complex - the titular Rabbit Hutch - as home base for an eclectic cast of characters who are all living their own lives in the dying city of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

The character with the most focus is Blandine, an 18-year-old girl who has just aged out of the foster system. At first glance, Blandine might seem more like a manic pixie dream girl than a full character - however, as I learned more about her, it became obvious that that was more of an armor to combat the deep insecurities within her. I honestly loved her character, and felt deeply for her as she processed her experiences. I felt like Gunther perfectly captured the angst & frustration of a brilliant young woman stuck in systems that actively work to hold her back.

My only critique is that some parts began to feel entirely disconnected to the novel’s core; I think some expansion on the other characters in the story would have helped tighten the thread, and made it even more compelling. Overall, though, an excellent book!

Thank you to the author & publisher for providing me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review. This review will be shared on my Instagram account (@bookish.901) by August 28.

I loved the first third of this novel until it was evident that it was not a precursor to something great but the beginning of a disparate cast of characters and a listing of their anxieties. This book observes different people at different stages of life all plagued by fear, anxiety, mental illness and depression. The fact that it is a revolving list of maladies for every one of these people shouldn’t preclude it from being interesting or having a plot but sadly, in this instance, it does.

It’s a special treat when the right book comes at just the right time. Tess Gunty’s debut novel “The Rabbit Hutch” is just that for me. Gunty is most comfortable operating in the thin zone that separates The American Dream from The American Nightmare. Through an interleaving of the lives of several disparate individuals and groups she touches on multiple hot button issues that all too many households struggle with today.

It is difficult to capture exactly how Gunty manages these themes. Existential and seemingly intractable challenges such as Climate Change, homelessness and the lack of affordable housing, corporate greed, outsourcing, industrial pollution, addiction, the dark side of social media, and male domination are focused upon. But “The Rabbit Hutch” is anything but a polemic. Each theme is handled in a seamless, matter-of-fact manner, often combined with some of the slyest, most clever, and smartest humor that always arrives at just the right time.

The social challenge that receives the widest lens is the tragedy of child welfare in the United States. Way too many children drift between abusive parents to state-funded, and not too closely monitored, Foster Care to emancipation without sufficient supports. What could go wrong?

Note that there are some themes in “The Rabbit Hutch” that may be discomforting including abuse of animals, inappropriate and abusive relationships, and some violence. None is gratuitous, but certain passages could disturb sensitive readers.

“The Rabbit Hutch” is simultaneously exuberant and anarchistic. Just the right book at just the right time.

Thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for the eARC.

The Rabbit Hutch is an entirely original tale about a post-industrial town in the Midwest: Vacca Vale, Indiana. It floods, it's polluted, and it's covered in rabbits. In other words, Vacca Vale is peak Midwest-core (coming from a lifelong Midwesterner).

The novel follows Blandine Watkins, an 18-year-old girl who desperately wants to exit her body. She's obsessed with female mystics and finding out the humanity in those around her. Her roommates, three teenage boys, all met when attending a class for kids aging out of the foster care system. Their neighbor, Joan, is a single 40-something who moderates comments on a obituary website. Their other neighbor, Hope, is a new mom slightly terrified of her own baby. Together they live in the Rabbit Hutch, an affordable housing complex in Vacca Vale.

The Rabbit Hutch is a haunting, complex, and darkly funny story about finding beauty, solace, and peace in grim realities. Highly recommended. If the reader reviews tell me anything, it's that this is going to be a very divisive bookclub title, but great fodder for discussion!

Gorgeous writing couldn’t overcome the very depressing characters and lack of hope in this book. It may simply be it wasn’t the right time for me to read this book.

Whenever I picked up <i>The Rabbit Hutch</i>, I was immersed in it and couldn’t put it down. The characters were so engaging, and I took so many notes of quotes that hit me.
<blockquote>She felt like a demanding and ill-fated houseplant, one that needs light in every season but will die in direct sun, one whose soil requires daily water but will drown if it receives too much, one that takes a fertilizer only sold at a store that’s open three hours a day, one that thrives in neither dry nor humid climates, one that is prone to every pest and disease. What kind of attention would make Joan feel at home? Who would ever work that hard to administer it? She will never own live houseplants.</blockquote>
<i>The Rabbit Hutch</i> reminded me of college. Blandine had a large part in this – her existential thinking and general energy brought me back and reminded me of classroom discussions. I can’t quite put it into words, but the whole book had “college energy.” I think that says more about me and how I thought/felt during that time - <i>The Rabbit Hutch</i> just evoked similar feelings.
Complaint: I did not understand how the apartments were numbered. Not essential, but every time an apartment number was mentioned, I sat there and tried to figure it out.
<i>The Rabbit Hutch</i> stressed me out. In a good way? I don’t know if I’d recommend it to my patrons simply because I feel like I’d have to know them really well to feel comfortable putting this in their hands. My book club members, however, will be hearing about this.
<i>Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.</i>

2.5 stars rounded up because I feel bad rounding down even though I kind of want to.

This started off so well. I was immediately intrigued by Blandine, I loved the initial world-building Gunty was doing and the bizarre cast of characters she was introducing, and I had very high hopes. Unfortunately, the further I got into the book, the more they evaporated and I ended up ultimately underwhelmed and pretty disappointed.

I've noticed many other reviews mentioning that this book was just too weird for them, but it wasn't for me. It was a book that was trying to be weird, that seemed desperate to be quirky and "out there" in an attempt to seem more interesting and literary without much real purpose. In that way, I think Gunty has a bit of maturing to do as a writer, though there's clearly enough skill and voice there that I do think by book two or three, that self-conscious, try-hard approach to fiction could be sorta wrung out of her so that she could hone in on something a bit more genuine. Because she's not quite there yet, this seemed to really lack nuance and finesse and reminded me of the kind of work you'd see in a college creative writing workshop.

On the flip side of the obtusely weird, there was the eye rollingly cliche. Blandine, in many ways, was a manic pixie dream girl x 10,000. Gunty handed this character all the damage one could imagine as well as a preternatural intelligence and obsession with the mystic. You know the kind of character I mean and how exhausting it can be. I don't think I need to say anything else in that regard.

The secondary characters ended up being way less interesting than I first thought as well, with most being completely unnecessary and their presence a bit confusing. I feel like Gunty used them as a distraction from the rickety nature of the main narrative and I was just... not feeling it.

I wish I could say the ending was surprising, dramatic, meaningful, or anything at all, but by that point, I was so desperate for the whole thing to be over that any effect it could have had was well gone.

Again, this review really pains me - there are definitely glimmers of something special in Gunty's writing, hence the generous rounding up of my rating, but it ended up being a very big miss in the end. That being said, I would definitely read another book from her in the future - Google tells me she signed a two-book deal, so I'm sure I'll get that chance.

Thank you to the Publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy.

TW: Murder, Animal Cruelty, Religious Abuse, Parental Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Harassment, Student-Teacher Abuse, Addiction, Stalking, Drug Use, Mental Illness.

This is the kind of book I am always looking for. This year has been a fairly disappointing reading year especially when it comes to galley's I've been sent and new releases. However, The Rabbit Hutch is anything but disappointing. Following multiple POVs of different residents of an affordable house complex, in a dying mid western town still trying to cling to its former automobile glory days. The main storyline focuses on Blandine Watkins, an orphan recently graduated from the foster system living in the La Lapenniere apartments together with three other former foster kids. Blandine is obsessed with Catholic mysticism, and dabbles in some light eco-terrorism whenever she is not serving pies at the local dinner. The other cast of characters one more impossibly wonderful than the next, include the son of a former silver screen diva, a content moderator for an obituary website, and a young mother who is terrified by her infants's eyes.

Everything here borders on the surreal on the almost otherworldly, but yet it shows such beautful snapshot of a terrible time of one community in such a real way. All of the characters are extremely interesting in unexpected ways, and the more you get to know them they more complex they become. Like real people you feel like you never fully understand or know them, but you never lose interest.

The only reason this isn't a full five stars for me is that towards the end some of the dialogue became a bit heavy handed like it belonged more within the inner thoughts of the characters rather than the dialogue. I do recommend this for anyone who is even slightly interested in the premise. The writing is magnificent and the world so deeply wonderful!

It is impossible to isolate a single element that makes Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch so amazing; it is a virtuoso performance, a stunning debut that runs like clockwork, meticulously planned and reasoned, and simultaneously so smooth and compelling that one flies through its 400-odd pages. It is a novel about lonely people; it is a novel about outcasts; it is a novel about a dying city; it is a novel about wanting to transcend all of these things. It is funny, it is devastating, it is beautiful.

The novel is set over only three days in July in the fictional city of Vacca Vale, Indiana: a wasteland, willed into existence by a now-defunct automobile manufacturer and its empty factories that still blight the landscape. It is one of America’s top ten dying cities; it is prone to flooding; it is a place as real as any I have been. The titular Rabbit Hutch is La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, an apartment building where most of the characters reside.

“I think we should all take each other a little more seriously,” Blandine Watkins, the novel’s protagonist, says. She is speaking to a neighbor she has just met for the first time, in the laundromat, after assaulting her with apocryphal stories about young mystics who sweat blood and claimed to be engaged to Jesus Christ. Blandine is a force: eighteen years old, bleached-white hair and more intelligence than she knows what to do with, fresh out of the foster care system and living with three boys a year older than she is. She dreams of revolution, she reads Hildegard von Bingen, she makes voodoo dolls. She longs to escape from her body because of the way it has been treated, because of the things she has been subjected to because of it; the idea of finding pleasure in the body is foreign and unattainable to her, sometimes dangled over her like a carrot only to be snatched away.

Other central characters are Joan Kowalski, forty years old, alone, and moderating online comments for obituaries; Blandine’s roommates, Jack, Malik, and Todd, simmering with testosterone and adrenaline; and a visitor to the city, Moses Robert Blitz: the eccentric son of a recently-deceased actress, now in his fifties and jaded by Hollywood and his late mother’s extravagance.

The personality of her characters is vibrant and seems to radiate from the page; better yet, because of the shifting perspective, every major character is examined from multiple angles. Blandine finds herself repulsive; every other character finds her otherworldly and beautiful. This is a novel about damaged people, alienated people, people who do not trust easily, and it presents them with empathy. It is a wild creature, jagged and sometimes ferocious—filled with conviction and unquestionably capable of standing on its own—but at its heart is a deeply-felt tenderness.

How is it possible for us to become so alienated from people so physically close to us, the novel asks? Blandine is palpably isolated; her relationship with her roommates is dysfunctional at best, and she has no close friends. She hardly knows any of her neighbors. It’s a testament to Gunty’s ability that a novel about so many unhappy characters doesn’t read as bleak; even though every one of the main characters is lonely, the brief connections between them are so rich and full of life. The revelations happen in those intersections. The novel is brimming with the lifeblood of the everyday, alive with the frustrations and the exaltations of it; maybe more than any other book I have read, every single point of contact between two people has some kind of meaning.

Recently I had the pleasure of taking a seminar on style—what it is, how to talk about it, how to improve it—with Garth Greenwell, one of my heroes. When analyzing the style of another writer or our own, he asked us to reflect on its limits. What forms does this prose accommodate—essays, sermons, book reviews, manifestos, philosophical tangents? What languages, or dialects, are allowed to speak in the work—the voice of a parent talking to a child, the voice of academic discipline, the voice of religious devotion? It’s hard to imagine language Gunty couldn’t adopt. She casts a wide net, switching between viewpoints easily, from character to newspaper article to the aforementioned online comments sections and so on; it’s a display of her flexibility, both in prose and in form.

Much of the novel is locally non-chronological (though the overarching structure is chronological and linear), and there is a breadth of perspective. In this sense it’s reminiscent of the polyphony in novels like Jennifer Egan’s Welcome to the Goon Squad or The Candy House—where it can at times feel superfluous—but here, the multiplicity of voices is tightly spun and carefully controlled, structurally effective to the extreme. In a passage that is mind-boggling in its competence, the narrative is presented as overheard gossip interwoven with standardized test questions, the two dancing around each other and interacting in brilliant ways; there is one brief section that might be categorized as a kind of abstract graphic novel. The form is perfect for the story being told: it is controlled chaos, a portrait that emerges, gradually and beautifully, from the overlapping trajectories of so many lives. However disparate, everything inevitably fits in this book, somehow so dense it should be bursting and yet so well-contained.

Some of the most touching scenes take place in the storm’s eye; notable is “The Flood,” a chapter at the center of the book that recounts a young married couple’s blissful stasis, their overnight stay in a motel. The way Gunty writes about sex is gorgeous and erotic, full of heart and feeling and beautiful language. After they sleep together, the woman muses: “It was the familiarity of conjugal sex that moved [her]. To her, it proved that the ordinary could transform you, too.”

The style is nothing short of miraculous: in her writing, the ravings of internet trolls are voiced with as much conviction as typo-strewn messages from well-meaning relatives. A teenager’s analogy between capitalism and an exploitative relationship is not only welcome but triumphant. One of the novel’s greatest achievements, the chapter “Variables,” is an account of what a high-school student first thinks of as an affair, but what is really her exploitation; it was originally a short story Gunty published in The Iowa Review. The details have been significantly changed, and it has been greatly expanded and improved. Reading it, one feels the omniscient third-person narrative voice as a presence of its own: so clever with its repetition and wry commentary that it’s dizzying. I am reminded of something Roxane Gay said in her review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot: “Man, this is a writer just showing off just how well she can write.”

The key to it all is how effortless it feels. There is no struggle to tie everything together. The writing is confident, assured, whatever you want to call it: it invites you inside and then grips you, dares you to go along with it.

The Rabbit Hutch asks us to break out of our solitude: to reach across the gap. To be transformed by the ordinary. To take each other just a little bit more seriously.

I think the cover art is the best thing abt this debut. I was intrigued by the pre use and the first few chapters drew me in but it just got a bit too weird for my taste. I thought the rotation of characters in the soy complex was cool and I do badly wanted to follow along but I stead u got lost.

The tide is starting to turn against so-called "sad girl lit": stuff like the works of Ottessa Moshfegh, books that try to mine the depths of female despair for an attempt at something like catharsis in a world where, historically, women's pain has been diminished and ignored. I'm a bit of a sad girl myself, and I could easily rattle off my psychiatric prescriptions to pull some sad girl rank. But the sad girl narrative is starting to lose its piquancy, often with the very sad girls who loved the genre so much to begin with.

At least from my vantage, these books have started to feel samey largely because their sad girl protagonists just aren't weird enough. The isolation of being a young woman is so startling that even the electively induced coma that the protagonist of "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" turns to doesn't seem to scratch the surface of what it feels like to not only be a girl who is unsettled, but a girl who is unsettling.

Enter Tess Gunty's "The Rabbit Hutch." This book is absolutely bursting at the seams with weird women, women who make themselves and others uncomfortable as they attempt to do what they need to survive. Blandine, the closest thing this kaleidoscopic novel has to a protagonist, is interested in the lives and writings of Christian female mystics, women whose bodies were battered in an attempt to transcend the world of the body entirely. This is an angle of female suffering that I don't see much in the nihilistically hedonistic world of sad girl lit, which makes this book refreshingingly quirky and strange.

While I loved most of the ideas underpinning this book, I did occasionally feel like they lacked the nuance and subtlety to let the reader draw their own conclusions. Disliking a book because it is "overwritten" can come off as a lazy critique or a roundabout way of calling something pretentious, but I found that some of Gunty's experimentation undermined the depth of her characterization by making some characters come across as mouithpieces for her ideas rather than fully-fledged people in their own right.

Overall, I did enjoy this book, and I hope this heralds a new era of what women who feel out of place can expect from the books that are marketed toward us. We need more books for girls who watch David Lynch instead of Lena Dunham.

"Sometimes, Moses Robert Blitz... paints his entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks, forcibly enters the house of an enemy, and wakes the enemy. Then he flails around in the dark, naked and aglow".
Now that I have your attention, let me rave about this book. It's violent and messy and full of wisdom and scary observant. In a rundown midwest town, 4 ex-foster kids are sharing an apartment and trying to get by. This is their story, but also the story of others who live in the apartment complex and a few adjacent characters, including Mr. Blitz- who is a trip. I was never, not once bored. I had no idea where this was going and could not turn the pages fast enough to find out. Everyone in this book is sloppy, and complex. Somehow, Gunty manages to capture examples of humans at their best and also at their worst (perhaps at the same time). I highly recommend this to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's work. Trigger warnings for animal violence and cruelty.

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty is a novel that you will enjoy if you like novels where the setting is also a character. Tess Gunty's writing is so descriptive, so alive, I felt like I was walking the streets of Vocca Vale and the abandoned Zorn factories.