RABBIT HUTCH follows a group of tenants living in a run-down apartment building on the edge of Vacca Vale, a dying city in Indiana after the exodus of blue-collar jobs. With lyrical prose, Gunty depicts four teenagers, three boys and a girl, who recently aged out of the foster-care system. Like anyone remaining in a town on the brink of economic collapse, the girl Blandine is desperate for an escape. Set across one week, RABBIT HUTCH illustrates the loneliness and tenacity of humanity in search of a community.

RABBIT HUTCH is the winner of the 2022 National Book Award. While extremely well-written with experimental forms, the loose plots made it hard for me to get invested in the story and the characters. The backstories are at times difficult to keep track of and don't always seem relevant to the story.

The main character, Blandine, is written as an intelligent and ethereal 17-year-old with a photographic memory who quotes Marxism and analyzes everything through the lens of capitalism. It felt like Gunty was trying too hard to make Blandine appear a genius rather than allowing the character to naturally show her intelligence. For a character-driven book, I prefer to have a couple of characters I can root for, but in the case of RABBIT HUTCH, I unfortunately felt detached from the story.

Overall, I think RABBIT HUTCH is a book that may be better appreciated if read slowly and with a physical copy to flip back and forth. I have a lot more thoughts that might contain spoilers, so please DM me if you want to discuss what this book means