I think the cover art is the best thing abt this debut. I was intrigued by the pre use and the first few chapters drew me in but it just got a bit too weird for my taste. I thought the rotation of characters in the soy complex was cool and I do badly wanted to follow along but I stead u got lost.

The tide is starting to turn against so-called "sad girl lit": stuff like the works of Ottessa Moshfegh, books that try to mine the depths of female despair for an attempt at something like catharsis in a world where, historically, women's pain has been diminished and ignored. I'm a bit of a sad girl myself, and I could easily rattle off my psychiatric prescriptions to pull some sad girl rank. But the sad girl narrative is starting to lose its piquancy, often with the very sad girls who loved the genre so much to begin with.

At least from my vantage, these books have started to feel samey largely because their sad girl protagonists just aren't weird enough. The isolation of being a young woman is so startling that even the electively induced coma that the protagonist of "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" turns to doesn't seem to scratch the surface of what it feels like to not only be a girl who is unsettled, but a girl who is unsettling.

Enter Tess Gunty's "The Rabbit Hutch." This book is absolutely bursting at the seams with weird women, women who make themselves and others uncomfortable as they attempt to do what they need to survive. Blandine, the closest thing this kaleidoscopic novel has to a protagonist, is interested in the lives and writings of Christian female mystics, women whose bodies were battered in an attempt to transcend the world of the body entirely. This is an angle of female suffering that I don't see much in the nihilistically hedonistic world of sad girl lit, which makes this book refreshingingly quirky and strange.

While I loved most of the ideas underpinning this book, I did occasionally feel like they lacked the nuance and subtlety to let the reader draw their own conclusions. Disliking a book because it is "overwritten" can come off as a lazy critique or a roundabout way of calling something pretentious, but I found that some of Gunty's experimentation undermined the depth of her characterization by making some characters come across as mouithpieces for her ideas rather than fully-fledged people in their own right.

Overall, I did enjoy this book, and I hope this heralds a new era of what women who feel out of place can expect from the books that are marketed toward us. We need more books for girls who watch David Lynch instead of Lena Dunham.

"Sometimes, Moses Robert Blitz... paints his entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks, forcibly enters the house of an enemy, and wakes the enemy. Then he flails around in the dark, naked and aglow".
Now that I have your attention, let me rave about this book. It's violent and messy and full of wisdom and scary observant. In a rundown midwest town, 4 ex-foster kids are sharing an apartment and trying to get by. This is their story, but also the story of others who live in the apartment complex and a few adjacent characters, including Mr. Blitz- who is a trip. I was never, not once bored. I had no idea where this was going and could not turn the pages fast enough to find out. Everyone in this book is sloppy, and complex. Somehow, Gunty manages to capture examples of humans at their best and also at their worst (perhaps at the same time). I highly recommend this to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's work. Trigger warnings for animal violence and cruelty.

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty is a novel that you will enjoy if you like novels where the setting is also a character. Tess Gunty's writing is so descriptive, so alive, I felt like I was walking the streets of Vocca Vale and the abandoned Zorn factories.

A very different book for me.... I can't pinpoint exactly what it was that encouraged me to finish this book. The author lures you in with her story telling and the lives of very different characters who are linked together in interesting and, at times, tragic ways. When a book makes you think about it after you have completed it, it has done its job. Well done, Tess Gunty!

Hmmm. I wish I would've loved this more. The plot sounded so intriguing to me. "The Rabbit Hutch" deals with very sensitive subject matter, which I didn't mind but there were too many characters to keep track of. The narrative switches so abruptly that I couldn't keep all the point-of-views straight. It was very overwhelming. I decided to keep reading, and overall I was expecting more from this story. I just felt disconnected from the ending. It wasn't a bad novel and the writing was nice, but it's a mixed bag for me.

First off, the cover art for this book is amazing. Immediately made me interested! One thing that can also make or break a book is its summary, which in my opinion, fell short of when describing this novel. I realize that with such a bizarre premise, it can be difficult to write what the book is about, but I think something a little more mysterious and drawing the reader's attention to that fact that the book doesn't follow a typical narrative could have been the way to go. Let me get into the overall plot- loved it. The idea of different people living in an apartment complex in a derelict town that's about to undergo a complete gentrification is a very interesting angle. By the summary blurb, I thought this book was just going to be about the foster kids and their antics. Blandine was such a great character, and I was constantly wondering what would happen to her. The subplot with the deceased actress was great, as was her son obsessed with rubbing the glow stick substance all over himself. I would love to see a film or tv show capture this entire book! I think this novel would be great for fans of the podcast (and books series based off it) Welcome to Nightvale or even Twin Peaks. It has just the right amount of strange moments that you can appreciate it wrapped up in emotion and grit. I will be telling everyone about this one, and can't wait to read more of Tess Gunty!