Rabbit Hutch

I moved through this quickly, and I think that speaks to Gunty's storytelling abilities. @jilliansayre says this is a bunch of short stories/novellas in a trench coat convincing us it's a novel. That's probably a fair description. There are lots of bits in here that feel like set pieces Gunty had and wanted to use somewhere, but they are good set pieces.

I don't know if despair is merely the tone of this novel, its setting, or if that is what the novel is about. Some characters have a brief flash of ecstasy, but it's brief and maybe they don't. There is plenty of cruelty. Wise men say that there is a very narrow space between comedy and tragedy and it must be hard to write in that space, but the author sometimes seems to camp in it. She uses the comedic technique of the unexpected element in a series with great success. I found all of this unusually satisfying and her characters are unusually memorable. Another reviewer recommended Blandine T-shirts, and he might be right.

Prose is strong, characters are strong, plot is strong. A strong book