City of Belmont - Ruth Faulkner Public Library

The rabbit hutch, Tess Gunty

eng

no index present

fiction

The rabbit hutch

Tess Gunty

This novel is about an odd assortment of residents living in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest. Bristling with intelligence and humour, this is a piercing look at a community on the brink. An online obituary writer. A young mother with a secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents. Separated by the thin walls of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the run-down Indiana town of Vacca Vale, these individual lives unfold. But Blandine is different. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, she shares an apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all of them like her products of the state foster system. Plagued by her past, let down by the very structures that were supposed to keep her safe, she spends her days reading Dante and dreaming of becoming a female mystic. Until, that is, one sweltering week in July culminates in an act of violence that will change everything, and finally offer her a chance to escape. Blandine is desperate to save a community that has been left behind, but that salvation will come at a terrible price

adult