Of the many glowing reviews and accolades for this National Book Award winner, the description of interconnected stories was what made me buy The Rabbit Hutch: a cast of characters living in one apartment building (nicknamed the rabbit hutch) wherein a girl is stabbed and the details leading up to it are laid out.
As I began reading, it definitely fell into the category I was hoping, which is very similar to Jennifer Egan‘s novels The Goon Squad and The Candy House. I loved the repeating words peppered into different stories, the different storylines tantalizingly woven together. Gunty’s narrative was MUCH easier to follow than those aforementioned, and there is a true main character in the unforgettable Blandine. I was fully invested and anxious to know how her story would play out. EVERY character is so brutally, and weirdly complex: a mother suffering from postpartum depression and is afraid to look her baby in the eye, a man who likes to paint himself with glow stick liquid and frighten people, or a woman who shuts her self off from the world and treats herself to maraschino cherries in bed at the end of the day are just a few examples. The fictional Vacca Vale is also vividly rendered as a recognizably dying Midwestern town, with once beautiful parks besieged by floods and left to ruin, or gentrification. 
The way the story eventually comes together is completely bananas and I loved it. My only critique was that Blandine‘s character relied heavily on dialogue about philosophy and isms - so much Hildegard! I felt as if I was missing some themes because I don’t know a lot about female religious mystics, like the book was too smart for me. But, even not fully going on philosophical deep dive, it was still a fantastic read and an impressive debut.

“But mostly, the violence was administered by the attention, which was the wrong kind of light – a radiation that burned her, gave her melanoma of the spirit.”