Bunny by Mona Awad —Review

Author: Mona Awad

My Rating: 5/5

My Favourite Quote: “September. Warren University. The Narrative Arts department’s annual welcome back Demitasse, because this school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party.”

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon,” and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus “Workshop” where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

~Goodreads Synopsis

This book is so fucking weird, and I love it.

It is incredibly atmospheric and disorienting. The writing feels surreal and warped and often it is hard to understand if what you are reading is real or imagined by Samantha.

But despite this effect you are still able to empathize with Samantha, as she tries to navigate this surrealist nightmare of an Ivy League MFA program. I think anyone who has been in a scenario where they have felt both out of their depth and annoyed with a pretentious scenario will feel for Samantha, and enjoy watching the world shift into something bizarre.

This book is so odd, and horrifying and hilarious. It made me laugh out loud at several points, and at unexpected moments because of how jarring the humour was. The pacing of this story is also wonderful, there was never a moment that I felt dragged, and I kept reading because I wanted to know what the hell was going on.  

This really seems like the perfect book for this fall. If you need a little catharsis from people or a school that takes itself too seriously and would like that to come in the form of messed up magical rituals, read this book. And, if you just need to escape into a silly horror story right now, this might be the story for you!

If you have read this book, I’d love to hear your opinions! Do you love it or hate it? It seems like it might be a bit polarizing. Also, if anyone has any recommendations of books in this same sort of tone, I would be very interested in taking a look at them!