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Throughout, tension is mixed with hilarity, heartbreak with hope. It all makes for a gripping, memorable debut full of peculiar wonders.” — The Mail on Sunday(London), “The Very Hottest Summer Reads”
The dinner benefit for the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, also included an honorary prize for Tracie D Hall, executive director of the American Library Association. Hall remembered childhood trips with her grandmother to the local library in the Watts section of Los Angeles, a building she likened to a cathedral and benefactor that permitted her to borrow as many books as she and her grandmother could carry. Perhaps that is always the case with well-defined characters - we can't help but see something of ourselves in them.As I read this I was thinking to myself, this is good but not great. Nearing the end, though, I recognized that I had been captured by the story, the characters and particularly the prose. I realized that despite some flaws, four stars was not where this novel belonged, and I gave it five (my fourth five-star read in a row; that has never happened to me). Why did I change my mind? There was so much to enjoy. The structure of the novel, which focused on the residents in an affordable housing complex named The Rabbit Hutch (the name is in French, so it sounds more upscale), fit the story well. We meet the residents of various apartments and follow some of them consistently while others disappear until the end of the story, which frustrated me.
These are lives lived too close for comfort and too remotely for care, and it’s a model for everyone’s problem in this novel, which is populated by people like the young mother who both seek love and feel it as a terrible imposition on their own psyches. “People are dangerous because they are contagious,” thinks one man. “They infect you with or without your consent.” Anderson, Hephzibah (July 16, 2022). "Tess Gunty: 'I was an almost freakishly devout child' ". the Guardian . Retrieved October 26, 2022. After four years of toiling in New York, Gunty and her partner, an urban designer, moved to downtown Los Angeles in 2019. When the pandemic shutdown hit in 2020, they relocated to Silver Lake, mostly because she missed trees.I protested the Church and its hypocrisy whenever I could with the kind of life-or-death energy you devote to ideologies when you’re young. I was ashamed of almost everything in those days, but I was never ashamed when I publicly confronted a priest about the Church’s sexism, which I did every chance I got, even when it made my peers ashamed on my behalf. When I discovered the countless ways the Church was hurting my friends—some had been abused by priests; some spurned in their communities when their parents divorced; some were rejected for their sexuality; some had to drop out of high school, suffer public humiliation, and give birth against their will because they were denied birth control first and abortion second—my rejection of the Church became absolute. I explained this rejection to my parents, but they continued to force me to attended church every Sunday, so I stopped accepting communion. Once, I tried to stay in the vestibule of the church, but my father threatened me, and that’s when I knew that my parents’ insistence on my Catholicism wasn’t just about faith; it was an assertion of their dominance over my body and mind. Naturally, this made me double-down. If we drove through Vacca Vale, Indiana—the fictional town where The Rabbit Hutch takes place—what would we see?
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