The Rabbit Hutch (Large Print / Library Binding)
Staff Reviews
Wow. The Rabbit Hutch is wonderful, insane, and brilliant, and I love, love, love it. Rust belt, Indiana. The denizens of a crumbling apartment building are desperate to transcend their crumbling lives; to transcend trauma, forgottenness, and fame, to transcend the emptiness of material circumstances. To transcend the body. This book is ALIVE. The lives within it pop, scream, and bleed off the page.
— Chris Lee
Vaca Vale is a wasteland in the Midwest, rundown and abandoned like so many towns. Focusing on an apartment complex called the Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty brilliantly takes us on a three-day journey through the occupants living there. The story of lives of Blandine (the central character we keep coming back to) and others is told in a non-chronological fashion as we wind through the days and history that brings everyone to the Rabbit Hutch during this time. The writing is mind-boggling, balanced and structured so that you go down every winding character's story as if you had overhead it while gossiping about the neighbors. Read this now!
— Jason Kennedy
Tess Gunty visited Boswell on August 10, 2022. Watch the recording of her event here.
— Boswell Book Company
Gundy’s daring, bold, and brilliant debut will shake you, shock you, make you laugh, maybe make you cry, and keep you riveted to the very last page. It takes place in a once-thriving, now decaying industrial Midwestern town. Most residents are decaying with the town, but Blandine’s internal volcano is about to erupt and shake the town. Stunning.
— Kay WosewickAugust 2022 Indie Next List
“The Rabbit Hutch is an inventive and lyrical tale of Midwestern decay, environmental destruction, and toxic masculinity. John Brandon meets Lauren Groff with the occasional experimental aside. An ambitious and assured debut.”
— Matt Stowe, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
Description
Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building.
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents -- neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.
Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.
Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.
Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.
