The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Gunty, Tess. The Rabbit Hutch. Penguin Random House LLC, 2021.

Tess Gunty's novel The Rabbit Hutch is written from both the first and third person points of view. The novel also employs the past and present tenses, and subverts conventional notions of the linear narrative plot line. The following summary relies upon the present tense and a streamlined mode of explanation.

Seventeen-year-old Tiffany Watkins lives with her foster parents in Vacca Vale, Indiana. She attends St. Philomena, the only private school in town. In her junior year, she becomes involved with her music teacher, James Yager, while preparing for the school play. Although Tiffany has longed for the chance to escape her life, meeting and becoming intimate with James alleviates her loneliness and makes her feel more grounded in reality.

One night, while James's wife and children are away on vacation, James and Tiffany have sex at James's house. Over the days and weeks following, however, James stops communicating with Tiffany.

Feeling hurt and ashamed, Tiffany becomes desperate to vacate her body. She starts obsessing over the mystics and changes her name to Blandine, after a martyred teenager in 177 AD France.

Not long later, Blandine leaves her foster family's home after completing an Independence Workshop. She moves into the Rabbit Hutch apartments with her new acquaintances, Jack, Todd, and Malik. Over the course of the following weeks and months, Blandine does everything in her power to manufacture a transcendent religious experience.

Meanwhile, Blandine's neighbor Joan struggles with her own loneliness. As a 40-year-old single woman living alone, Joan often feels cut off from the world. Her loneliness resembles that of Moses, a man who has recently lost his mother. Instead of mourning this loss, however, Moses holds onto old bitterness against his mother. He also seeks revenge against Joan for having deleted his comment on an obituary website. He travels to Vacca Vale and ends up in a church. At the church, he confesses the truth of his bitterness to the resident priest, Father Tim. Father Tim challenges Moses to regard his mother's addiction, selfishness, and abandonment differently.

One July night, Blandine returns home from a fraught interaction with James to find her roommates trying to attack the goat she recently found in the park. In order to save the goat, Blandine rushes between Todd and the animal. Todd is holding a knife, and stabs Blandine multiple times in the stomach. Moses enters the building, having believed Blandine's apartment belonged to Joan. He is naked and covered in glow stick fluid. He bares himself, but stops when he sees Blandine's bloody body on the floor. One of the other neighbors calls the police, and they race to the scene.

After the police arrive, they take the boys into custody. Jack does his best to explain everything that happened to the officers, even including details from his, Todd's, Malik's, and Blandine's pasts.

Although Joan hears screaming in the apartment above her, she does not investigate. She has an inclination that Blandine might be in danger, but dismisses the concern, desperate to fall asleep. When she later learns that Blandine's stabbing inspired the noise, she feels guilty and visits Blandine in the hospital. Although she once thought the teenage girl strange, in the hospital, Joan feels an unexpected connection with Blandine.