The book opens with a stabbing. “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen.”
Blandine is the compelling protagonist of The Rabbit Hutch, an ambitious debut novel by 29-year-old L.A. writer Tess Gunty, whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere.
The novel is set largely at the La Lapiniére—or Rabbit Hutch—Affordable Housing Complex, where the walls “are so thin, you can hear everyone’s lives progress like radio plays.” The complex is on the edge of Vacca Vale, Indiana, a hallmark of the post-industrial Midwest and a town in shambles after the withdrawal of an automobile company. There lives Blandine, sharing an apartment with three other boys who have also recently aged out of the foster care system.
Blandine is ethereal, precocious and whip-smart despite dropping out of high school. Living in a town left behind by modernization and abandoned by her drug addicted mother and incarcerated father, she’s the epitome of a child let down by the system. Still, her morals persist. She rants about the horrors of capitalism and the epidemic of gentrification. When a group of developers plan to destroy a beloved park, she protests their meeting with voodoo dolls and fake blood.
