The Rabbit Hutch Reviews

The Rabbit Hutch

The Rabbit Hutch is a stunning debut novel about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love. “Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies—the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations.”—Raven Leilani, best-selling, award-winning author of Luster The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving its residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, lives one of these people, a young girl named Blandine Watkins, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine lives alongside three teenage boys, all recently aged out of the state foster-care system, all of them madly in love with Blandine. Plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her, Blandine pays no mind to their affection. All she wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads. Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a group of people looking for ways to live in a dying city, a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

Out of the Rabbit Hutch

"This is a story of freedom, risk, and unspoken truths; a time before and after the American Civil War and the eradication of the Aboriginal people in Van Diemen's Land (today's Tasmania). This unparalleled novel, Out of the Rabbit Hutch, unites the power and drama of two distant countries and two generations. Populated by socialites, opium users, slave hunters, and war heroes, the novel chronicles the remarkable tale of Asa Young, a veteran of America's Civil War. Unable to speak and still seemingly broken from the war, Asa is released from a mental asylum and entrusted into the care of the Jameson home, a family tainted by secrets and deceit. Initiated by their young daughter, Flora, a curious relationship of trust and understanding develops between the man and child. On the other side of the world, the devastating effect of Britain's brutal colonization of Van Diemen's Land remains an undercurrent of inward struggles seen through flashbacks and indirect revelations of past events. A man of integrity, Mallabal, a free Aborigine, journeys from this British claimed penal colony to antebellum America. His chance meeting with the ambitious Sydney Bushnell, who uses her feminine charm to defy the social restrictions placed upon women, embroils him in a forbidden relationship and a struggle for self-preservation. The book's sinister characters fan the suspense in a canvas of treachery and revenge, while conflicting personalities draw upon their courage and humility under the tests of endurance and survival. In this vivid and harrowing novel of a battle scared country and psychological turmoil of the human soul, Avery forges an intriguing plot balancing the unlikely interactions between characters with a refreshing blend of compassion, humor, mystery, and candor."--Back cover.

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