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One Apartment Building, Many Lives

In “The Rabbit Hutch,” Tess Gunty weaves together the daily dramas of tenants in a shabby Midwestern complex.

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• Aug. 2, 2022
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THE RABBIT HUTCH, by Tess Gunty

It’s all writers’ prerogative to kill their darlings, though it takes a certain élan to kill your actual protagonist on the first page — or at least send her sliding somewhere beyond this mortal plane, as Tess Gunty seems to in the opening of “The Rabbit Hutch”: “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18 years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen.”

It’s one of many bold moves in Gunty’s dense, prismatic and often mesmerizing debut, a novel of impressive scope and specificity that falters mostly when it works too hard to wedge its storytelling into some broader notion of Big Ideas. The parameters of the story itself are confined almost entirely to a single summer week in the fictional Midwestern city of Vacca Vale, Ind. — one of those dying third-rate metropolises, whose tenuous grip on prosperity faded when its main industry, Zorn Automobiles, collapsed under a cloud of debt and ecological misdeeds several decades before.

Blandine is a child of Vacca Vale born and raised, if rarely cared for: an autodidact and eerie Valkyrie beauty, with her piles of well-thumbed tomes on 12th-century mystics and corn-silk halo of hair. There was a mother once, we are told in a few deftly sketched sentences, with a fateful oxycodone habit, and a father in jail; then a series of foster families. Now she works at a local diner heavy on avant-garde pie — flavors of the day include lavender lamb and banana charcoal — and shares a shabby apartment with three other aged-out foster kids, all troubled varieties of teenage boy.

It’s their building that the book takes its title from: Originally designed to house Zorn laborers and christened La Lapinière in an act of misplaced faith and European flair, it’s now a run-down complex that no one ever really refers to as anything other than the Rabbit Hutch. The walls there “are so thin, you can hear everyone’s lives progress like radio plays,” and Gunty passes through them with a God’s eye, dipping in and out of units like C12, where a 60-something widower furtively checks his ratings on a dating website, and C10, where an aspiring influencer vamps, ready for his close-up. An elderly couple in C6 play out age-old patterns of low-level domestic strife in a cigarette-smogged living room while Hope, the fragile young mother in C8 struggling to bond with her newborn, finds comfort in reruns of a golden-age sitcom called “Meet the Neighbors.”

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BILLY SUMMERS, by Stephen King.

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SONGS FOR THE FLAMES: Stories, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Translated by Anne McLean.

This collection is primarily preoccupied with stories of war and imperialism in Colombia, legacies that haven’t ended but have instead devolved into generational traumas, state corruption and endless cycles of violence.

BREATHING FIRE: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires, by Jaime Lowe.

Lowe’s account of the roughly 200 incarcerated women fighting wildfires in California addresses the state’s economic disparities, its woeful prison system and its struggle to contain the effects of climate change.

READ UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin.

As our reviewer, Monica Drake commented, in this tender, meditative memoir, Griffin’s evangelizing of Black literature sends you back to Baldwin, Coates, Morrison and others “to ponder and treasure them anew.”

THE BIG SLEEP, by Raymond Chandler.

This first novel by a master of crime fiction, originally published in 1939 and reissued with an introduction by James Ellroy, introduces Chandler’s famous private eye, Philip Marlowe, who is hired by a millionaire to stave off a blackmailer and finds himself embroiled in nefarious criminal schemes.

THE ARSONISTS’ CITY, by Hala Alyan.

Alyan’s novel spans decades and continents to tell the story of a family, torn apart by war in the Middle East, as it comes together in Beirut to prevent its ancestral home from being sold off. As our reviewer, Maya Salam, put it, “Alyan turns paragraphs into poetry.”

Published on July 29.

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The death of the show’s former star, an apple-faced American sweetheart named Elsie Blitz, comes as hard news to Hope, though it allows the book to leap to Malibu, where adult Elsie reigned for decades as a passionate benefactor of the endangered three-toed pygmy sloth, and a far less devoted parent to her only child, Moses Robert Blitz. Elsie is a familiar archetype but a well-drawn one: the perfect Hollywood monster, so blithely dedicated to pleasure-seeking and stunted by fame that she’s raised a son whose entire persona, even in his early 50s, is shaped around hating her.

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Contributor Bio

Wayne catan, more online by wayne catan.

• Stone and Shadow

The Rabbit Hutch

By tess gunty, reviewed by wayne catan.

Tess Gunty was raised in South Bend, Indiana, where she attended Catholic schools straight through college. In 2015, with a bachelor’s in English from Notre Dame under her belt, she moved to New York to study with Jonathan Safran Foer and Rick Moody at NYU. She brought with her a deep knowledge and love of the Rust Belt, which is apparent in her debut,  The Rabbit Hutch . The novel is littered with Midwestern imagery: abandoned warehouses; jetsam from the once booming Zorn Automobile Company; a verdant valley; and a diner for townies, where the eighteen-year-old protagonist, Blandine Watkins, works.

Gunty wastes no time grabbing the reader’s attention with this opening sentence: “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body.” The why and wherefore are the questions Gunty will answer over the course of a masterfully orchestrated multivocal performance. Our curiosity is piqued with each page we read, thanks to a variety of clever narrative techniques: obituary comments, epistles, and a chapter comprised solely of black-marker drawings.

Of all the places Gunty turns her attention to, however, it’s the titular Rabbit Hutch that is most suggestive. The Rabbit Hutch is an affordable housing complex in fictitious Vacca Vale, Indiana, where Blandine lives with three teenaged boys who, like Blandine, have just aged out of foster care: Todd, Malik, and Jack, who is “wound to the wrong moral time zone.” A spinster, Joan Kowalski, lives in C2; she works at Restinpeace.com scanning obituaries for insulting comments. A mom named Hope, who has “a phobia of her baby’s eyes,” lives with her family in C8. Reggie, a former engineer for Zorn, and his wife, Ida, are in C6; these two septuagenarians have downgraded to apartment living after losing their house. Gunty evokes the loneliness of apartment living in Vacca Vale:

The sensation that disturbs Blandine most profoundly as she walks across her small city is that of absence … Empty factories, empty neighborhoods, empty promises, empty faces. Contagious emptiness that infects every inhabitant. Vacca Vale, to Blandine, is a void, not a city.

In addition to unique characters, Gunty’s gift lies in capturing Vacca Vale’s character. The town exudes hopelessness—unemployment and crime are rampant, and it is ranked first on “ Newsweek’s annual list of Top Ten Dying American Cities.” The city once “had a pulse you could feel in Chicago,” but that was when Zorn was booming. Yet Vacca Vale also has a certain cultural vibrancy: home to many who have never lived elsewhere, the city has developed its own patois.

So when a New York City developer and his team make plans to revitalize the city, Blandine is understandably not happy and coordinates a protest involving voodoo dolls, fake blood, and animal bones to put a stop to it. Through Blandine, Gunty’s message is clear: if you build in the Rust Belt, keep true to its roots and ensure affordable housing so residents are not displaced.

Much of The Rabbit Hutch focuses on Blandine’s loneliness and search for happiness as she drifts through her city, interacting with customers at the diner, her roommates, Joan in C2, and a music teacher. Although a high-school dropout, Blandine is an intellectual who reads Dante in her spare time and finds inspiration in the work of Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen: “The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!” Blandine’s favorite place is one worthy of Bingen herself, the fittingly named Chastity Valley. It’s an orientation point, a place where Blandine can get her bearings:

[Blandine] can feel her whole body relax as she descends into greenery. Over a thousand maple trees live in the valley. Deciduous, the sugar maples are astonishing in the autumn, carpeting the woods in crimson, plum, and cadmium yellow.

As the rest of The  Rabbit   Hutch unfolds, the reader learns more about the music teacher, encounters several scenes of animal sacrifice, and witnesses the bizarre behavior of a former child actor’s son. But it is the activities of the four teenagers in apartment C4—especially one night after Blandine brings home an injured goat—that are at the heart of the book.

The Rabbit Hutch is deeply researched, and it is obvious that Gunty has a deep love for the Midwest. Still, the sections about Hope and her baby would work better as a stand-alone short story. Despite this shortcoming, Gunty’s colorful cast of characters and description of Vacca Vale capture life in a run-down postindustrial Midwestern city. In her portrayal of Blandine and her three roommates, Gunty lays bare the emotional trauma foster children experience, as well as their desperate need to transition to a normal adulthood—which might mean leaving the Rabbit Hutch for greener pastures.

Published on November 4, 2022

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The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty review – a riveting debut about love and cruelty

The ecstatic mingles with the banal in a novel about lives lived too close for comfort in an apartment block in rust-belt Indiana

“O n a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen,” begins The Rabbit Hutch. “The mystics call this experience the Transverberation of the Heart, or the Seraph’s Assault, but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his 50s.”

So whatever happens next, you know that debut author Tess Gunty can nail an opening. What happens next is the gradual, chronology-hopping revelation of who Blandine is, what the mystics have to do with anything, how a glowing middle-aged male got himself involved in all this, and why so many human lives (and one goat) have converged on this one horrible moment.

The main setting is the Rabbit Hutch itself, the apartment block where Blandine exits her body. Its proper name is La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex in the city of Vacca Vale, Indiana – a rust-belt relic of a place that, having outlived its usefulness to the motor industry, has been left to decay. Nothing but a scattering of incongruously grand buildings and a poisoned water table remain as testimony to the glory days of the Zorn automobile company.

Zorn is an invention, and so is Vacca Vale, but the broad details are recognisable to anyone who knows a little about the malaise of America’s post-industrial heartlands, and especially to anyone who has seen Michael Moore ’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me, about the degradation of Flint, Michigan, after the withdrawal of General Motors. And to underline the parallel, Gunty opens her novel with an epigraph from that film.

The epigraph she chooses isn’t about economic decline, though, or the iniquities of capitalism. At least, not directly. It’s about rabbits, and it was spoken by Rhonda Britton, who was nicknamed “the bunny lady” after her appearance in the film. “If you don’t sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat … If you don’t have 10 separate cages for them, then they start fighting. Then the males castrate the other males … They chew their balls right off.”

If that’s what happens to rabbits in a rabbit hutch, what’s going to be the result when you pack a bunch of humans into one? Gunty travels through the fraught consciousnesses that occupy the housing complex. The elderly bickering couple; the sadsack sixtysomething man who resents women with “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument”; the young mother who is terrified by her baby’s eyes, with their “shrewd, telepathic, adult accusation” of her failure to bond.

These are lives lived too close for comfort and too remotely for care, and it’s a model for everyone’s problem in this novel, which is populated by people like the young mother who both seek love and feel it as a terrible imposition on their own psyches. “People are dangerous because they are contagious,” thinks one man. “They infect you with or without your consent.”

That’s even more the case when you’re a woman, with the kind of body that’s made to be occupied. A pregnant woman imagines herself as a building and the foetus inside her as a developer: “Room by room, he demolished her body and rebuilt it into his own.” Blandine rails against the female condition: “Her body contains goods and services, and people will try to extract those goods and services without her permission.” Of course she dreams of making her escape.

This is a novel that is almost over-blessed with ideas. Gunty doesn’t quite balance the pieces of her story – she has a winning impulse for digression, but she also seems anxious that you might forget about Blandine, and so never quite settles into her sidebars. The insistent nudges back to the main arc stop her novel from creating the sense of invisible clockwork that would make it perfectly satisfying.

At its best, though, The Rabbit Hutch balances the banal and the ecstatic in a way that made me think of prime David Foster Wallace. It’s a story of love, told without sentimentality; a story of cruelty, told without gratuitousness. Gunty is a captivating writer, and if she learns to trust her own talent, whatever comes next will be even better.

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Imprint: Oneworld Publications

Subject: General Fiction

The Rabbit Hutch

THE MULTI AWARD-WINNING NY TIMES BESTSELLER

DARKLY HILARIOUS AND SEARINGLY RELEVANT, THE RABBIT HUTCH IS A POWERFUL PORTRAIT OF 21st CENTURY AMERICA, SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF THE UNFORGETTABLE BLANDINE

Winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2022 *  Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 2022

‘Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny’ Observer

Vacca Vale, Indiana:  recently voted number 1 on Newsweek ‘s list of dying American cities. According to the developers, however, it’s a city with a whole history of reinvention, one that ‘buzzes with the American spirit.’

Not everyone agrees though – certainly not the residents of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial centre, populated by a cast of unforgettable, disenfranchised characters. There’s an online obituary writer, a woman waging a solo campaign against rodents and, most notably, eighteen-year-old Blandine, recently released from foster care and determined to stop the developers whatever the cost. 

Set over one sweltering week in July, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America. Bold, experimental and brilliantly written, it will live in the memory long after the final page. 

A Waterstones Book of the Year for 2022

‘ The Rabbit Hutch is 2022’s The Secret History ‘ The Big Issue

A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award *  Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize *  An Oprah Daily Book of the Year, 2022

A New York Times bestseller, Sept 3 2023

• Publication date: June 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780861545803
• Amazon.co.uk
• Waterstones
• Blackwell’s
• Bookshop.org
• Publication date: July 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9780861543656
• RRP: £16.99
• ISBN: 9780861543663
• Amazon.co.uk (Kindle)

'Philosophical, and earthy, and tender and also simply very fun to read.' 

'Here is something new, a first novel with the wisdom and tenderness of a masterwork; an unflinching look at the down-and-outs that continue to rise and rise.  The Rabbit Hutch  is addictive, mesmerizing and unforgettable.'

'Every now and again a debut novel comes along which is so accomplished you almost suspect the writer's name is a pseudonym for a mischievous literary veteran. Sure-footed, richly imagined and highly original, you could say  The Rabbit Hutch  is 2022's  The Secret History … a profound novel full of clever, thought-provoking ideas.'

'Original and incisive... Breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular.'

'Throughout, tension is mixed with hilarity, heartbreak with hope. It all makes for a gripping, memorable debut full of peculiar wonders.'

'Just when everything seemed designed for a brief moment of utility before its planned obsolescence, here comes The Rabbit Hutch , a profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art whose seemingly infinite offerings will remain with you long after you finish it. Each page of this novel contains a novel, a world.'

' The Rabbit Hutch balances the banal and the ecstatic in a way that made me think of prime David Foster Wallace. It's a story of love, told without sentimentality; a story of cruelty, told without gratuitousness. Gunty is a captivating writer.'

'Author Tess Gunty has the scope and acuity of David Foster Wallace, without the obscurantism and wilfully slow pace... Brilliant.'

'Strange, exuberant... Stylish.'

'Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies.'

'A firecracker debut. Seriously impressive... The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and voices remarkable... There’s so much dazzling stuff here.'

'Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny.'

Tess Gunty   was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. She received a B.A. in English with an Honors Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, where she won the Ernest Sandeen Award for her poetry collection. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow, and her work was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in  Joyland ,  The Iowa Review, Freeman’s,  and other publications, and she lives in  Los   Angeles .

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The Rabbit Hutch: THE MULTI AWARD-WINNING NY TIMES BESTSELLER Paperback – 22 Jun. 2023

Purchase options and add-ons.

DARKLY HILARIOUS AND SEARINGLY RELEVANT, THE RABBIT HUTCH IS A POWERFUL PORTRAIT OF 21st CENTURY AMERICA, SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF THE UNFORGETTABLE BLANDINE

Winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2022 *  Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 2022

'Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny' Observer

Vacca Vale, Indiana:  recently voted number 1 on Newsweek 's list of dying American cities. According to the developers, however, it's a city with a whole history of reinvention, one that 'buzzes with the American spirit.'

Not everyone agrees though - certainly not the residents of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial centre, populated by a cast of unforgettable, disenfranchised characters. There's an online obituary writer, a woman waging a solo campaign against rodents and, most notably, eighteen-year-old Blandine, recently released from foster care and determined to stop the developers whatever the cost. 

Set over one sweltering week in July, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America. Bold, experimental and brilliantly written, it will live in the memory long after the final page. 

A Waterstones Book of the Year for 2022

' The Rabbit Hutch is 2022's The Secret History ' The Big Issue

A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award *  Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize *  An Oprah Daily Book of the Year, 2022

A New York Times bestseller, Sept 3 2023

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Oneworld Publications
• Publication date 22 Jun. 2023
• Dimensions 5.51 x 1.85 x 19.81 cm
• ISBN-10 086154580X
• ISBN-13 978-0861545803
• See all details

From the Publisher

Product description

'A firecracker debut. Seriously impressive... The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and voices remarkable... There’s so much dazzling stuff here.'

'Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny.'

'Here is something new, a first novel with the wisdom and tenderness of a masterwork; an unflinching look at the down-and-outs that continue to rise and rise. The Rabbit Hutch is addictive, mesmerizing and unforgettable.'

'Every now and again a debut novel comes along which is so accomplished you almost suspect the writer's name is a pseudonym for a mischievous literary veteran. Sure-footed, richly imagined and highly original, you could say The Rabbit Hutch is 2022's The Secret History … a profound novel full of clever, thought-provoking ideas.'

'Original and incisive... Breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular.'

'Throughout, tension is mixed with hilarity, heartbreak with hope. It all makes for a gripping, memorable debut full of peculiar wonders.'

'Philosophical, and earthy, and tender and also simply very fun to read.'

'Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies.'

'Just when everything seemed designed for a brief moment of utility before its planned obsolescence, here comes The Rabbit Hutch , a profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art whose seemingly infinite offerings will remain with you long after you finish it. Each page of this novel contains a novel, a world.'

' The Rabbit Hutch balances the banal and the ecstatic in a way that made me think of prime David Foster Wallace. It's a story of love, told without sentimentality; a story of cruelty, told without gratuitousness. Gunty is a captivating writer.'

'Author Tess Gunty has the scope and acuity of David Foster Wallace, without the obscurantism and wilfully slow pace... Brilliant.'

'Strange, exuberant... Stylish.'

From the Back Cover

About the author.

Tess Gunty   was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. She received a B.A. in English with an Honors Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, where she won the Ernest Sandeen Award for her poetry collection. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow, and her work was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in  Joyland ,  The Iowa Review, Freeman’s,  and other publications, and she lives in Los Angeles.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oneworld Publications; Standard ed. edition (22 Jun. 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 086154580X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0861545803
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.51 x 1.85 x 19.81 cm
• 3,494 in Women's Literary Fiction (Books)
• 20,504 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• 25,239 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Tess Gunty holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon fellow. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Iowa Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Freeman’s, Joyland, and other publications. The Rabbit Hutch is her first novel.

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THE RABBIT HUTCH

by Tess Gunty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2022

A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining.

An ensemble of oddballs occupies a dilapidated building in a crumbling Midwest city.

An 18-year-old girl is having an out-of-body experience; a sleep-deprived young mother is terrified of her newborn’s eyes; someone has sabotaged a meeting of developers with fake blood and voodoo dolls; a lonely woman makes a living deleting comments from an obituary website; a man with a mental health blog covers himself in glow stick liquid and terrorizes people in their homes. In this darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing novel, there are perhaps too many overlapping plots to summarize concisely, most centering around an affordable housing complex called La Lapinière, or the Rabbit Hutch, located in the fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana. The novel has a playful formal inventiveness (the chapters hop among perspectives, mediums, tenses—one is told only in drawings done with black marker) that echoes the experiences of the building’s residents, who live “between cheap walls that isolate not a single life from another.” Gunty pans swiftly from room to room, perspective to perspective, molding a story that—despite its chaotic variousness—is extremely suspenseful and culminates in a finale that will leave readers breathless. With sharp prose and startling imagery, the novel touches on subjects from environmental trauma to rampant consumerism to sexual power dynamics to mysticism to mental illness, all with an astonishing wisdom and imaginativeness. “This is an American story,” a character hears on a TV ad. “And you are the main character.” In the end, this is indeed an American story—a striking and wise depiction of what it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation, and world.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-53466-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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IT STARTS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

More by Colleen Hoover

BOOK REVIEW

by Colleen Hoover

SEEN & HEARD

IndieBound Bestseller

IT ENDS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...

Hoover’s ( November 9 , 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.

At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8

Page Count: 320

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

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The Best Fiction Books » New Literary Fiction

The rabbit hutch: a novel, by tess gunty.

🏆 Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction

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Tess Gunty’s Debut Sends Readers Down the Rabbit Hole

“The Rabbit Hutch” reflects on the surrealism of the everyday.

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There are approximately 68 mentions of rabbits throughout The Rabbit Hutch ’s 352 pages, conjuring images of everything from pulling rabbits from hats to falling down rabbit holes to Alice in Wonderland to the banal life of a pet rabbit. It speaks to Tess Gunty’s evocative way with words that she weaves these strands together in the span of one book and one sweltering summer week. The story begins with a killer (literally) first line: “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18 years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen.” And so we tumble down the rabbit hole, Alice holding our hand along the way.

Apartment C4 nestles within a run-down complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a fictional city (though perhaps a nod to California’s infamous Vacaville) long ago abandoned by its primary industry, Zorn Automobiles. Vacca Vale is now wracked by environmental and economic woes. The complex—originally named La Lapinière (“The Rabbit Hutch”), in a stab at pseudo-European luxury—houses a multitude of characters whose mundanity borders on fascinating. There’s the grumpy widower in C12 who obsessively checks his negative dating app reviews; a bickering old couple in C6 struggling to remember why they’re together; the new mother in C8 who’s having trouble bonding with her baby; a single woman who spends her evenings eating maraschino cherries from a jar on her nightstand.

Gunty treats The Rabbit Hutch like a wall of glass cages at a pet store, and we readers are voyeuristic shoppers peering in. Unlike in the real world, we see every person’s dark, soft, and vulnerable parts, the things they keep hidden from everyone—perhaps even themselves. This sense of eerie omnipresence permeates the entire book, often flinging us from scenes in La Lapinière to other parallel story lines.

For instance, there’s an entire chapter dedicated to the self-written obituary of a glamorous, yet unhinged former child star, Elsie Blitz, whose blasé attitude toward being alive mirrored Blandine’s. In the obituary, she gives advice like “Beaver fur is overrated” and “Believe in ghosts, but not God, unless your conception of God is much like a ghost.” The only thing Elsie loved more than pygmy sloths was her son, Moses, although she never bothered to show it. Moses serves as the connection, eventually reaching Vacca Vale with a heart full of misguided revenge and a plan that involves a bag full of glow sticks.

But the story’s main focus lies on Blandine, a former foster kid who’s obsessed with ancient martyrs and mystics and—until recently—was a gifted high school student by another name. Blandine sometimes veers into that overdone manic pixie dream girl status—her three male roommates suddenly fall in love with her at the same time, for example—but most of the time she resembles a modern-day Alice, ejected from Wonderland and wondering why no one else has seen what she has seen. Gunty writes, “She was a fool for portals, willing to sign the thorniest contract—giants, isolation, tricksters, hunters, con-artist wolves, cannibalistic witches, anything—if it promised to transport her. There was no place like home because there was no home.”

Blandine is full of the angsty philosophical questions one would expect from a teenage loner. She asks one of her roommates, “I just…I want a life that’s a little more lifelike…don’t you?” The question The Rabbit Hutch attempts to answer is, what actually defines a life? As we come across medical marvels with phantom itches and mystics who miraculously survive death by lions, we also encounter the fragile break of a teenage heart and the furious grief of complicated mourning. There’s the dark side to the internet, as Blandine sees it, but also the refreshingly cordial comments on a post in a plant-lovers’ group. No matter how you spin it, life—the mundane and the fantastical—is a kaleidoscope of juxtapositions. In a dark confession cubicle, a priest reassures Moses, “It would be absurd to describe a whole person as good or bad. You’re just a series of messy, contradicting behaviors, like everyone else…as long as you’re alive, the jury’s out.”

The Rabbit Hutch: A novel

Social media (and probably Blandine, if she were on Twitter) colloquially jokes that humans are merely bags of meat; the implication being that we’re just messy, squishy, vulnerable blobs. Similarly, the characters in The Rabbit Hutch are all half-baked—not in the sense that they’re not fully fleshed-out characters, but that, like us, they’re humans rotating on this Earth for the first time, experiencing every emotion with violent force. They struggle, they make mistakes, they join communities, they feel unbearably lonely. This, Gunty muses, is the full spectrum of being human. The Rabbit Hutch is absurd, but if you scratch away the layers of surrealism and satire, you find Gunty’s practical insight into the meaning of life. It’s complicated, hard as hell, and yet beautiful. At its core, The Rabbit Hutch asks us to question what it means to be alive, especially in the age of the internet. Perhaps a deleted comment from its fictitious obituary website sums it up best: “There is nothing after this, ok? So don’t live like you have an Act III…I can’t reveal how I know, I had to sign an NDA…[but] these are your only minutes. What are you going to do with them?”

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Reading Through the Awards: The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

In a continuation of our series of micro-reviews, assistant editor Brandon Williams brings together a group of ardent readers to give their quick-hit impressions of recent novels which have won major awards from the literary world. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch , winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction, is our next selection.

Quick Book Summary (from the official blurb): “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.”

The Rabbit Hutch is about how our lives, even those that meet in the most fleeting moments or maybe not even directly at all, have long-lasting effects on each other. How does a passing conversation between strangers linger? How does a mean comment on an obituary come to be? Gunty does this by introducing us to a large cast of narrators. Each character is at a different stage of life and is facing their own problems. The only thing most seem to have in common is that they’re all tied to a run-down apartment complex known as the Rabbit Hutch. As the story unfolds, their sometimes very brief moments of interactions eventually snowball into a very violent act.

Isolation is what ties all of these stories together. At first, aside from some of them being neighbors or roommates, the many narrators really don’t have a lot to do with each other. They are each simply living their lives independent and lonely. A group of recently aged-out foster kids are learning how to interact with attraction. A young mother deals with the stress of a new baby. A woman deals with the stress of her job as the moderator for an obituary website. The man-child of a recently deceased celebrity seeks to announce to the world how terrible of a mother she was. Each of these eccentric characters lives their life more or less independent of the others. Bit by bit, their lives are shown to be more interconnected than they realize. The new mom grieves for the celebrity. The celebrity’s obituary is posted to a website one neighbor moderates. A tossed mouse carcass from one neighbor leads to revenge on another. A chance meeting while doing laundry leads to a lasting impression. Still, despite each of them being desperate to connect with others, each character is unwilling to simply open the door and connect to their neighbor. So it’s isolation, this self-imposed mindset and not a physical barrier, that becomes the central focus of the novel. It’s a timely message for a world where many of us, me included, don’t know our neighbors.

Gunty does a great job at making each of her many, many narrators unique even while they’re all grappling with the same isolation, the same desperate desire to be seen and wanted by someone. No two characters attempt tackle their shared problem the same way. Some become desperate for connection and seek it in inappropriate relationships and others, still desperate, go on to commit more desperate acts in order to simply be noticed. Some lash out in anger, repelling people away. Some don’t try to fight it at all. The Rabbit Hutch becomes a reminder that no matter how alone we may feel, we are all still a part of the world and each of our actions helps the world take shape for everyone else.

Rebecca Calloway

The captivating prose in Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch constantly made me forget I was reading a dark novel. It addressed various subjects including animal cruelty, mental illness, isolation, and beliefs to name a few. I could fill pages trying to summarize all the characters and their happenings and it would not matter because you’d need to read this beautifully written novel to truly capture what Gunty is illustrating. The Rabbit Hutch is not plot-driven, yet why did I find myself curiously turning each page and by the end, anxiously waiting to read the words I already knew were written there? Gunty ambitiously launches us from character to character, past to present, an entertaining self-written obituary, a comment section sprinkled with emojis, a list of quotes and even a chapter that boldly, and understandably so, presents itself as a graphic novel. While it is easy to get lost in the structure of some of these chapters, there is only one, in which gossip is interwoven between high school test questions, that I found obstructive.

The rather humorous novel takes place in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a deteriorating city plagued with more than just poverty and benzene contamination with environmental repercussions as a result. The novel begins, ends and always circles back to the Rabbit Hutch, which is an affordable apartment complex that houses most of the numerous, damaged and outcast-type characters we pan between. We get to know most of them on a hauntingly deep and personal level thanks to third-person narration. Frequently throughout her piece, Gunty mentions rabbits and it is impossible to ignore. From Death wearing socks embroidered with white rabbits to rabbit figurines staring frantically at whoever looks at them, I think they serve as a reminder to the reader that it is the characters themselves who are driving the story. The more we learn about these individuals, who at first glance seem like a collection of sporadic short stories, the more we realize they matter the most. Not one character is alike neither in their persona nor their devastating past nor current adversities. Yet they all share the same burden of trying to persevere in a dying city with little hope that those offering to help will actually deliver.

Granted, there were some characters and dialogue that I had trouble digesting because I didn’t think they were genuine and even mesmerizing writing couldn’t overshadow this. However, in the end, I can easily say that most of our beloved characters ended up being interconnected and significant, driving Gunty’s message home: humans need to start taking each other more seriously. I would recommend this novel to those that are patient enough to immerse themselves in the minds of seemingly random characters in order to appreciate them as a whole in the end.

Brittenny De La Cruz

For a deep dive into character, Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch doesn’t disappoint. Set in an affordable housing complex in a fictional Midwestern town, the apartment’s inhabitants provide a variety of personalities to explore. The banal, the minutiae, the absurd—all of a character’s interiority and history is covered in detail whether they appear for a few pages or multiple chapters.

But as wide-ranging as these characters are, and as experimental as the book becomes, The Rabbit Hutch avoids reading like a character’s summary because all of these details serve a purpose: to understand what drives a person. And, interestingly enough, this commonality is simple. Blandine Watkins, one of the central characters of the novel, puts it pointedly: “in the end, she was insignificant to the person who was most significant to her.” That slight imbalance, between what we mean to ourselves and to others, is enough to set all the cascading events in The Rabbit Hutch into motion.

It is often said that characters should always take center stage in a novel, and in the case of Tess Gunty’s, The Rabbit Hutch , they certainly do. Of them all, Blandine is queen. I found myself attracted to Blandine with a strange morbid fascination, very similar to the she-mystics Blandine herself idolizes.

The narrative, which shifts beautifully from mundane and almost expected tragedies to over-the-top and nearly fantastical ones, only builds on this mysticism than surrounds her. The other characters, while full of their own lush issues, all orbit around Blandine like minor players in a Greek tragedy. The strongest characters were the ones that became nearly archetypal in the roles they played at the end of Blandine’s story. However, when the scope of the narrative expanded past these characters to encompass the entirety of the Rabbit Hutch Apartments and all who live there, it dipped a little into overindulgence for me.

The writing itself had plenty of interesting concepts that hit their marks well, from blog posts to poetry, to an entire chapter of paintings. However, it also had its pitfalls. These came in the form of dialogue that felt unnatural for the sake of “saying something” and moments where it felt the author paused the flow of a scene to insist upon some grander point that was inferable and really didn’t need to be made.

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Briefly Noted

The Rabbit Hutch , by Tess Gunty (Knopf) . Although there are actual rabbits in this ambitious novel, the “Hutch” of the title is the name given to an affordable-housing complex by its residents, in a post-industrial Indiana town. Gunty zooms in and out of the apartments, pushing the lives inside toward a forceful and violent climax; her central character is a gifted though troubled teen who grew up with foster families, has dropped out of high school, and calls herself Blandine. (Obsessed with female medieval mystics, she takes the name of a French martyr.) Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement.

Northern Paiutes of the Malheur , by David H. Wilson, Jr. (Nebraska). In 1879, the Northern Paiutes, a tribe living around the Malheur River, in Oregon, were forcibly removed from their reservation by the United States government. In this searing and painstakingly researched account, Wilson challenges the accepted story of their exile, which placed blame on their primary chief, Egan, for inciting hostilities against white settlers. Charting the Paiutes’ history—their beginnings as a tribe of “kin-cliques” without central leadership, their first encounters with settlers, and, finally, the Bannock War of 1878—Wilson argues persuasively that they were victims not only of land theft but of a misinformation campaign whose effects have lasted more than a century.

Sinkhole , by Juliet Patterson (Milkweed) . Mixing autobiography, academic psychology, and an ecological history of Kansas, Patterson, a poet, examines the suicides in her family, beginning with her father’s. (“The worst had already happened, so why not face it as best as I could?” she writes.) She also investigates the suicides of her grandfathers—one a fertilizer-plant worker, the other a coal miner. Although she doesn’t presume to know why these men ended their lives, her archival research points to lead exposure, alcohol dependence, and money problems as likely factors. The sinkholes she finds around Kansas, products of mining and erosion, become symbols not only of the abysses suicides leave behind but also of a hollowing out of America.

Sonorous Desert , by Kim Haines-Eitzen (Princeton) . Seeking to understand how early monasticism was shaped by the “emptiness” of the desert, the author, a scholar of early Christianity, set out to capture the sound of silence, making field recordings in the deserts of southern Israel and North America. The result, a meditative blend of history and travelogue (complete with QR codes that link to the recordings), brings the soundscape of the desert to life. Haines-Eitzen writes that hearing the nuances of desert noises requires a “deep listening” founded on inner quietness, and she evokes this state through tales of the desert fathers, such as St. Anthony (251-356), who spent decades tormented by the clamorous voices of demons before finally learning to tune them out.

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The Rabbit Hutch

Thank you to the publishers for this early review copy, so a debut author I had otherwise heard nothing about only one thing for it… open the book. The term Rabbit Hutch depicts a picture in your head, I read the blurb – it didn’t give too much away – so as I started this book I didn’t really know what I was letting myself into. I confess I had a few false starts with this book in the first few chapters but on the third attempt I pretty much read it straight through. I found I had to really concentrate on the early chapters to just get used to the writing and the setting up of the plot lines but once I was in it all flowed brilliantly. Once I had reached the mid point I knew I wasn’t putting this down until the book was finished – so it did make for a rather late night – but the ending was beautiful and the late night was definitely worth it. Whatever Tess writes next I will absolutely be reading, certainly a talented author.

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35 of the best funny rabbit jokes that are downright hare-larious

These funny rabbit jokes are bound to make you and your little animal lover shed a laugh or three

20 of the best rabbit jokes for adults

15 of the best rabbit jokes for adults.

We’ve searched high and low to track down the funniest rabbit jokes around. So if you’re looking for gags that will make you ‘hoppy’, stick right here.

If you’re lucky enough to have a pet rabbit, you’ll already know how funny these flop-eared herbivores can be. Most bunnies are packed full of personality but, of course, we know their entire existence isn’t to make us laugh.

However, when you spot your rabbit binkying , hopping from one side of their hutch to the other or stomping their feet, you can’t help but be filled with joy (and laughter). To keep the chuckles coming, we’ve compiled a list of the best rabbit jokes – and for the more serious of you, some interesting rabbit facts. So let’s hop to it…

Funny rabbit jokes 

Whether you're getting your head around how to adopt a bunny , you already have a pet rabbit or you just have lots of love for these furry friends (and don't we all?) — discover our round-up of the funniest rabbit jokes for adults below.

• Where did the rabbit go for a trim? The hare dressers.
• How did the rabbit keep fit? By going to hare-obics classes.
• Where do rabbits go when they aren't feeling well? The hops-spital.
• What did the rabbit say to the piece of wood? It was nice gnawing you.
• What do you call a rabbit in a kilt? A Hopscotch rabbit.
• What did the rabbit use to propose to his girlfriend? A 24-carrot ring.
• Why didn't the rabbit eat lunch? It didn't carrot at all.
• What do you call a line of rabbits hopping backwards? A receding hare line.
• What’s a rabbit’s favourite type of music? Hip-Hop.
• What do you call a rabbit that’s raised inside? An in-grown hare.
• Why was the rabbit sad? It was having a bad hare day.
• Where do rabbits go after their wedding? On their bunnymoon, of course.
• What do you call a rabbit in a good mood? A hoppy bunny.
• What did the rabbit say to his wife? No bunny compares to you.
• Which pair of rabbits were famous bank robbers? Bunny and Clyde.
• Did you hear about the rich rabbit? He was a millionhare.
• Why do rabbits get so tired in April? Because they just finished a March.
• What kind of books and novels do rabbits like to read? Ones with hoppy endings.
• How can you tell that a rabbit is getting old? Look for the grey hares.
• What did the magician say after the rabbit vanished? Hare today, gone tomorrow.

Who said rabbit jokes were just for adults? Teach these rabbit jokes to your kids and they’ll love telling them to friends and family.

• What is a bunny’s favorite motto? Don’t be mad, be hoppy.
• How do you know carrots are good for your eyes? Because you never see rabbits wearing glasses.
• How do rabbits travel? By hareplane
• Why did the bunny cross the road? He wanted to prove he could hip hop.
• Where do rabbits learn how to fly? In the hare force.
• What do you get if you mix a beetle and a rabbit? Bugs Bunny.
• How does the Easter Bunny stay fit? He does a load of eggs-ercise.
• What do you call a Transformer bunny? Hop-timus Prime.
• Why do bunnies love action movies? Because they are hare-raising.
• Why don’t bunnies use combs? They use hare-brushes instead.
• What do you call a very rich bunny? A billion-hare.
• Where do you take a rabbit when their hair is too long? A hare stylist.
• What do you say to a rabbit on its birthday? Hoppy birthday.
• What sort of jewelry do rabbits like? Anything that's 24 carrot gold.
• What’s a young bunny’s favorite game to play in school? Hop-scotch.

If you’re looking for even more animal-inspired jokes to add to your collection, cast your eye over the funny cat jokes that are hiss-terical. Or the funny dog jokes that will make you howl with laughter.

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Becks is a freelance lifestyle journalist who has more than 9 years of experience in the world of digital and print journalism. She covers health, wellness and family interests for a range of titles. When she's not putting pen-to-paper (or finger-to-keyboard) she's reading, in the gym, or taking her Dog Aunt title very seriously looking after the handful of four-legged creatures in her life. 

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