Reviews with content warning for Adult/minor relationship - The Rabbit Hutch

Wow. This was fantastic. A beautiful story of how you can feel so alone in the world, and have no idea that every person around you deals with similar feelings and emotions and traumas. How your neighbors are strangers, but live lives that aren’t so far from your own. A “coming of age” story of people who even in their 60’s don’t feel they have it all figured out yet. A story of people just trying to live, and love, and hate, and find peace in turmoil, trying to find where they fit in the world without becoming a part of things they despise. It’s beautifully written, quirky, poetic, deep, raw, and true. I loved this a thousand times more than I thought I would. Absolutely wonderful.

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veeples's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

At times, this book can feel like a bit of a slog to get through. The writing is pretty, but the pieces feel a bit too disconnected and figuring out how they fit together doesn’t always yield a totally satisfying conclusion. However, there are nuggets of painfully sincere and beautiful displays of vulnerability and humanity that are enjoyable. I’m sad to see I felt most fond of the adult characters and their inner lives over the central girl who is a teenager; her plight is not uninteresting nor unrelatable, but I just found I liked the other minor characters a little more.

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cstein's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

In this ambitious and then painfully pointed examination of contemporary struggle, Gunty employs a unique narrative style and extensive knowledge of her spiritual and philosophical forebears to great effect. The late, Dostoevsky-esque monologue chapter was the novel's highlight and a pleasure to parse through. Gunty has a keen eye for phenomena one passively observes but never articulates. However, when it finally arrived, the scene anticipated from page one felt underexamined.

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maura_kathleen's review against another edition

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challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I had an unusual time with this book for an unusual reason: the author, who with this novel won the National Book Award on her debut, was briefly a classmate of mine in undergrad, where she was a few years above me. I did not know her well, but knowing the author at all made for a strange reading experience for me. I took writing classes in college (not with Gunty — our single shared class was lit-based) and grew accustomed, at that time, to engage a particular critique-y part of my brain when I was reading the work of peers, and I felt it auto-reengage when I started to read “The Rabbit Hutch”. Also, the content of the novel leans heavily on certain elements that were common to everyone who shared our undergrad environment. It’s not a secret that she based Vacca Vale heavily on South Bend — in at least one interview I saw, she described Vacca Vale as an alternative imagining of the city if it had not had a major university factoring so decisively into its trajectory — and so that terrain was a bit glaringly familiar. (The South Shore Line does not have a café car, lol.) The novel also returns again and again to different lenses on Catholicism. Nearly every character has some relationship to it or encounters it meaningfully at some point; the book is thematically dedicated to probing the relationship between religious tradition, mysticism, skepticism, and spirituality, asking in which ways they serve as excuses for each other. There’s no reason why Vacca Vale shouldn’t also tell a story with Catholic roots, but it kept striking me as such a South Bend-y story (again, without an ND around to force the question) that it took me out of things. (I grew up elsewhere in the Midwest, not all that far from South Bend, in a region where we Catholics were vastly outnumbered by Protestants.) Anyway, the upshot of all of this was that it took me much longer to “buy in” to the reading experience than I usually do, and I think that’s mostly the fault of my unusual circumstances, which made me less generous toward certain literary conventions than I typically am. (For example, I couldn’t get into that newspaper article toward the beginning of the book describing the event vandalism because I was fixated on the ways that it shirked a fully journalistic tone to allow for more efficient narrative exposition.) I was reading as if I was watching a play from the side of the stage, with one eye constantly trying to peek behind the curtain and see where the effects were coming from. It took me until about a third of the way into it to really feel engaged, but I’m glad I did get there. Blandine grew on me gradually, and while there were times when I felt… I don’t know, like the characters around her were granted slightly too much alertness to the fact that she was the main character… I nevertheless liked the project of her and how her role at the center of the novel invites such a sympathetic review of the (dis)embodied experiences of the mystic women ahead of her in her lineage. Much to like in its prose, themes, and evocative setting, even if it was too South Bend-y. Pardon me for forgetting names, but I’ve read a whole other novel between finishing this book and writing this review… but while I did like most of the non-Blandine focus characters, I’m still torn on whether their roles in the novel fully cohere to me. I viewed the TV star’s son as the adulthood extrapolation of the psychological ramifications of parental abuse or neglect, which was a valuable perspective in some sense, but his most idiosyncratic behavior nevertheless seemed contrived too perfectly with the intent of giving the moment of Blandine leaving her body a finer veneer of mysticism. The obit. monitor lady was maybe the character I enjoyed following most, because of her plainness; I thought she was the loveliest portrait. That there were quite a few disparate narrative perspectives here was not a bad thing, especially because the novel was so interested in establishing a vivid sense of place and exploring its vital importance, but the sum of it felt a bit too constructed, a bit padded. The ending could have used more time to feel fully justified. Also, I’m really not a fan of reading about

teacher/student relationships, even when they’re openly acknowledged as abusive, and even when that’s the point… it’s just a plot type that I am usually repelled by.

Finally, I’m shocked that I made it all the way through the next novel that I read without clocking that I had just read two books in a row that concern themselves with foster care… perhaps because the foster system experience here, although foundationally iimportant, ends up feeling a touch marginal, at least relative to Kingsolver. Overall, some mixed feelings, but I’m glad I read it, and I congratulate the Tess on the tremendous accomplishment of her debut.

Oh, and there are a few too many rabbits in this novel. The symbolism got a bit haphazard.

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