RavePaste MagazineThis Arthur feels like a real, three-dimensional person with appropriate flaws and never crosses into being a cliche. Perhaps characterization like this is easier when you’re working from a template, and Grossman is working with one of the biggest templates in literary history ... Written in modern English, with chapter epigraphs and occasional poems in Middle English. This approach is smart and much less annoying than being unnecessarily formal ... The Bright Sword made me love fantasy again. Its many asides are pearls of inventiveness that are a bunch of fun to read whether or not you know the story already.
Colin Winnette
MixedPaste MagazineUsers is trying to position itself among a group of work-critical books and shows that have come out in the past year ... I can’t help but remember the book in scenes... a taxonomy which is encouraged by the short chapters Users is broken into. I think this is also because these scenes are focused on vivid inciting events, which they lean on in order to spur Miles into another loop of thought ... This is also why the imagistic failures stand out so clearly. The bar scene, for example, happens when Miles attends a work mixer he thinks the sender of the death threats invited him to. I was confused about where characters stood and what they were doing for about half a page, long enough to be a problem, but not long enough to be an effective stylistic choice.
Tess Gunty
PositivePaste MagazineTess Gunty’s debut novel propels itself by setting up conflicts between people who are already on edge, exhausted, and afraid, and lets you see where the pieces will fall long before it topples them over ... Gunty has a talent for short descriptions...and this extends to her characters as well: often with one offhand trait, you get the sense of exactly who someone is ... Blandine in particular feels like the subject of other peoples’ attention: fascinating in their chapters, but adrift and preoccupied in her own. The violence that’s teased only exacerbates this problem. Blandine is sickly and odd, but desirable to everyone around her until she expresses a need or frustration ... At its end, and at select few moments throughout, The Rabbit Hutch relaxes this isolation and lets its characters relax into each other. In those moments, the narrative shines like a bag of glow sticks: industrial, dazzling, the sum of its disconnected parts.
