Books and Bylines

“Suddenly I am the weird, sad circus vegetable. And it’s the absurdly priced organic produce that is staring at me with something like horror.”

I’ve recently learned that I can send books from Libby to my Kindle (I realize I’m years behind the curve on this discovery), and ever since I’ve been an absolute terror to my local library. I’m borrowing book after book after book…I can’t stop. Bunny by Mona Awad was recommended to me by my most trusty source, Booktok. I went in knowing very little about the premise, which I think enhanced my reading experience. My only knowledge before I cracked Bunny open was a brief, back-of-the-book-esque summary and one Goodreads review that described it as Heathers meets Frankenstein (shout-out to Kat from Goodreads, who I don’t know but whose review was at the top of the book’s profile). I said, “Sounds good enough to me!” and dove in.

As it turned out, I barely came back up for air. I ate this book up in less than three days, and really enjoyed just about every word. The words I did not enjoy so much were the ones I didn’t know, but that’s what Dictionary.com is for. Bunny follows Samantha, a sour graduate student at one of the most prestigious schools in the country who has a serious case of main character syndrome. Samantha is a writer (of course she is) who has a tragic backstory (of course she does), and she can’t relate to the four other girls in her year who she finds herself required to interact with for class. They call themselves Bunnies, and they are best friends; they share inside jokes, mini cupcakes, and glowing feedback for each other’s writing, all without Samantha. Not only can she not relate to them, but she hates them, and nicknames them aptly: The Dutchess, Cupcake, Creepy Doll, and Vignette. Samantha and her best friend Ava roll their eyes at the Bunny cult and Samantha convinces herself that the alienation she experiences at the hands of the Bunnies is water under the bridge. She doesn’t need or want to be associated with them, anyway. At the start of her last year in her MFA program, Samantha finds herself with an invitation to a Bunny gathering that she hesitantly accepts. She finds herself falling into the rabbit hole, and slipping away from reality.

I would describe Bunny as a mix of horror, thriller, magical realism, and a dash or two of mystery and speculative fiction. The book struck me personally as an insightful commentary on mental illness and loneliness with some winks at feminist thought. But, in all honesty, I think a thousand people could read Bunny and emerge with a thousand different interpretations. That said, it wasn’t hard to follow, and it didn’t fall so deep into symbolism and metaphor that it was pretentious. Mona Awad’s prose is beautiful, descriptive, and at times illusory and psychedelic. Samantha is not exactly an unreliable narrator, but she’s also not NOT an unreliable narrator. This style of narration made for an exciting read with a lot of twists and turns (for me, at least. Anecdotally, I’ve seen and heard others say that they saw twists coming). The 100 or so pages leading up to the conclusion of the book were like a train flying off the tracks in the best way imaginable.

The characters are all well thought out and given room to have multiple dimensions. Even the Bunnies (while often described as an inseparable conglomeration of perfume, complex hair braids, and giggles) still are completely distinguishable from one another in personality and appearance. Ava and Samantha tango (quite literally) through a friendship that is messy, loving, complex, and relatable. Samantha, while not immediately (or ever) an easy character to love, unravels a narrative that makes sense to anyone who’s ever crawled into the deepest corners of their mind to find reprieve from loneliness. Throughout all this, Mona Awad plays with various fiction tropes, pokes fun at the shiny sham of expensive higher education, and weaves in symbolism using fantasy, fairy tales, horror, and the predator/prey dynamic of various animals. 
This would be an amazing book to read with a book club. There is a lot to unpack in Bunny – in my opinion, more than can be unpacked in one lone, spoiler-free review. If this book were in my hands right now, and I was about to hand it off to a friend, I would tell them to read as little as possible about this book before they finish it. It’s just more fun that way. Overall, consider this a rave review. SO five stars, Bunny.