Bunny: A Novel

A fun light-horror dark academia read with a big end reveal that made me say, whoa! Really enjoyed it but not sure I liked it enough to read the sequel.

Samantha—loner and outsider at prestigious Warren University—finds the rest of her writing cohort beneath her and relentlessly denigrates them with her arty friend, Ava, until an invitation arrives.

I did not care for this at all. I found it predictable, and irritatingly coy about its predictability. The protagonist is the worst mean girl of all the mean girls, and a tedious, self-absorbed one at that. I just found everything about it silly and boring, and wouldn't have read it had I known it was magical realism, which I despise. Absolutely not for me.

Stop asking me to write a review. Thank you a lot.

At first, I wasn't sure about this book. I didn't always appreciate it's tone or general the attitude towards the "bunnies". Although I fully understand the dislike of that specific kind of rich girl, I felt that it was kind of... unfair towards a group of women who's only crime was to be kind of bitchy and privileged. I thought that Samatha's hatred of everything around her and Ava's personality in particular were a bit extreme, kind of similar to the critiques she'd get from her classmates about how she would wallow in her own misery to think she's better than everybody else. I find this kind of relatable actually and still liked Samatha but it all felt kind of... juvenile maybe?

I'm not sure when my opinion changed. I wasn't sold on the writing at first, but I really grew to like it. I really didn't like the violence against animals (and I still don't), but overall... this was excellent. The ending was especially fantastic. I loved the reveal about Ava and think it really helped things make sense. I wasn't sure about Max at first either or the direction it was going, but I was ultimately just really impressed. I think it's hard to write a review for a book that's critiquing the whole pretentiousness of academia and writing in particular. I really liked Sam's journey though and I thought the book did a great job of capturing the New England pretentious academic kind of vibe. I'm from New England and it's really just right.

In the end, I was totally hooked and invested. The writing was great. It was all so intense and dreamlike. Also, I strongly disagree with the people who say it was all in Sam's head the whole time and she has schizophrenia or something. I think that kind of ruins the magic of the book. It can still be meaningful and metaphorical even if all the weird shit "actually" happened. I also think they're just wrong within the context of the book. I guess you could say that Sam is an unreliable narrator, but... why? How would you even decide what she's making up and when? Why do people read books like this and always decide it must have actually just been schizophrenia! It just makes me mad. It can be dreamlike and metaphorical and also just magical realism. Not every book has to be "Fight Club". I actually think that after reading some other reviews and reddit posts, that people are misrepresenting this ending in a similar way to how the ending of "Lost" was/is misrepresented. It DID all happen. It's fictional obviously, but certain events happened within the book. Sure, certain events and characters can be representative of themes or ideas, but why does that mean "it was all just a dream". AGHHh. I shouldn't have read those reviews.

Overall, I loved this book and I loved how weird it was. I would say this is a pretty accurate representation of art school.

Deeply unimpressive and not nearly as smart as it thinks it is. There are much better satires on the decay of MFAs than this.

4.5 stars...I was so confused this whole book!
Jonah is my favorite, I want to read a whole book about just him.
The writing was phenomenal. The author really drew you in and made you feel like you were in it with Samantha from the get, so every step and turn was more and more confusing- just as it was for her.

Ummmmm....This is either a mashup of the Secret History/Fight Club with mostly psycho Barbies for characters, or the study of a brilliant schizophrenic artist who hasn't learned to navigate her illness yet. Either way, I don't know what just happened.

3 stars
was very confused, might have to read again, I think I liked it?? lots of interpretation needed to make sense of it. characters: 3, plot: ???, writing: 4.5

This is such a weird book. It is filled with twists and turns that I didn't see coming, and it feels like I need to reread it to fully understand what is happening because of how weird it was. It gives off quite an unsettling feeling, and I have continually thought about it since finishing.

I’m often inclined to give an author an extra star in my rating for inventiveness – even if some twists border on the bizarre. But “Bunny” was so weird that I gave up less than halfway through (such surrender only occurs in about 3 percent of the books I pick up – but who's counting?) None of the characters piqued my interest – even with their quirks. I found the writing disjointed. I give two stars for what began as an intriguing premise. But this book simply was not my literary cup of tea.

This is the second time I'm writing this review because the first on didn't post at B&N --thanks, nook app. I "love" starting over...

But hey, I did like this book. It's confusing as heck because of the trippy things that happen--the main character Smackie, an English grad student with a huge inferiority complex, is also a highly unreliable narrator. But her imagination kicks in big time as she bleeds out her tale of woe while trying to fit in with the rich girls on campus, who reach out to include her after several semesters of treating her like an other.

And she is an other--the horror elements are a fantastic and bizarre flip to a Stepford Wives ideal, but the love story, the real love story that makes Samantha the "other", is the reason to keep reading. You could argue that there are similarities to plenty of stories out there, such as Mean Girls or Heathers (movies are stories too), or the obvious nods to Alice in her Wonderland. But the telling of this bunny horror fairytale is weird and unique and original in a good way, too.

Check it out horror fans.

Some spoilers.

I mean, the MFA program stuff hits hard and funny! I told R about these parts and he said hasn't that been done a hundred times? but then I elaborated on the plot. Lots of elements are familiar -- the Mean Girl group, the outsider best friend who gets you but may indulge your worst tendencies, writer's block, the rich elite school, the kid who escapes the real world through stories. But she takes all of that and yanks it in her own direction.

She uses language to heighten and distort the realism into almost parody but also something fantastical. The novel itself is an escape from the harsher real world stuff realities that inspire the story. If only the creepy prof, the nonsense feedback of workshop, the constantly moving goalposts of MFA work, the sense of isolation, the dysfunctional ways we deal with grief--if only all that could be chopped up and chopped off and leave us with the best parts of the creative process.

I'd say the focus of creating the perfect guy is a little heteronormative, but Awad calls that out herself. I do wish it weren't So White and So Straight. Because there's lots she could have done with that, or at least do a little. Also, I spotted the Twist sooner than I'd have liked too. And the language could have been pruned back a bit more. But now I feel like a fussy workshop student looking for something to criticize ...

In this high concept novel, a clique (or is that a coven?) of female MFA students take the narrator, an outsider, under their collective wing. Their initiation rituals involve mysterious male figures and exploding rabbits. Mysterious stuff happens.

It is hard to know if our narrator is insane, under the influence of drugs, in a parallel reality, or just cracking under the pressures of grad school. There is some beautiful writing and interesting observations in this novel, but I would be hard pressed to explain it.

This is basically a fever dream.
Also, what the hell does “does gynaecological hand gestures” even mean?
So many nonsensical sentences and bizarre scenes.
Completely unreliable narrator.
I definitely didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. I am just thoroughly confused.

The first 25% I was pretty sure I wouldn't like this all that much, but what do you know, it did come together nicely. I had no idea where the story was going, and I still feel a little like I went through a whirlwind, but I did end up enjoying this! (Definitely not going to try and write a review, though.)

i cant't really make up my mind about bunny, it was very different from what ive expected for sure

This book is wild. I really have no idea what I just read, but it was completely bonkers in the best possible way. Definitely not for everyone, but it's the most original book I've read in awhile.

Weird, fast paced, not sure where you’re going in the story.

What a trip! I liked it but I don't think I can recommend it to people I know lol.

I picked up “Bunny,” by Mona Awad after having just finished reading “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” also by Awad, which I LOVED. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about “Bunny.”

I really hate to say this, but “Bunny” was one of the worst books I have ever read. It started off so slow, nothing really happening, and continued slow to the end. I kept reading, thinking it would pick up. It never did. By the time I realized it was not going to get any better, I was about a third of the way through the book, so I continued to the end, having already invested a lot of time in the book. I should have cut my losses and ditched the book. Unfortunately, Awad followed up “13 Ways” with a clunker of a book.

The book is full of rambling sentences and thoughts, and so absurd and much of it made no sense at all. It reads like the author was a 13 year old on drugs or something. At the end, I realized it was total garbage.

None of the characters were likeable, not even Samantha, the protagonist. The Bunnies, were all cardboard characters, with nothing to differentiate one from the other, especially the dialogue. The author’s voice was disjointed and difficult to follow. Even Ava, who should have been a likeable character for loving Samantha, even after Samantha abandoned her, was not someone seen in a favorable light.

Save your time and money. Skip this book!

So... yeah, no. I still don't know what this book was trying to tell me.

It started super interesting, even hilarious, then disappointed me at every turn and left me with a lot of regrets.

Was it a horror story? A comment on higher education? I have the feeling it was trying to be, but it never made its point. And it was just so in love with itself.

I mean, the prose is really good. Mona Awad can do wonderful things with words. This story was definitely not the best way to show it.

Every character in this book is an asshole. Which would have been totally fine, if
a) I wouldn't have gotten the impression the author wanted me to actually like the main character, and
b) all that assholery would have culminated in some greater point.

The protagonist is sour, hates everyone and is very in love with her own self-pity, because things are never her fault, of course. She whines and lies to basically everybody in her life. And when you look past her inner monologue, she rarely ever actually does something and takes action. Oh, and she also hates women, because she's not like the other girls.

Maybe it was making a point about the characters and how everyone is flawed. But in order to do that, the characters were just too flat, too one-dimensional. Everyone is judgemental, juvenile and the story is women hating on women.

How about the magic? Well, that was a really cool concept, but we nerver learned enough about it for this book to be about that. We never even learned enough about the potential of this magic beyond creating boys. Seriously - those women are aspiring writers studying at an elite school and all they think about in their free time is... men?

Also, the protagonist literally creates a man to do everything for her that she is too passive to do. That is some serious lesson there.

So... in the end, this book left me with a very bad feeling about what the author thinks about herself, her work and other women.

This is one of the most unusual novels I've ever read, and it knocked me off balance again and again. I almost abandoned it a third of the way through, but I'm glad I hung on and finished it.

I was never sure how reliable the narrator is. I'm not sure a reader should *ever* fully trust a narrator who is a writer, much less a creative writing graduate student.

One of the offical blurbs refers to reading it as a "down-the-rabbit-hole" experience, and the more I think about it, the more apt it seems. It's not just a clever play on the title. The sheer, wild audacity of the plot becomes greater and more intense as it progresses.

Is it "magical realism"? Maybe yes? Maybe there's only a veneer of "realism"?

Read this if you like the fact that cute, fluffy bunnies have very big and scary teeth.

Do you enjoy the type of movie where you’re never quite sure what is real and what is a dream, and the movie just ends, leaving you to then ponder the meaning for yourself? Then this will surely be the book for you. It’s bizarre, surreal, unique, and going by some of the reviews I’ve seen, definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. ⁣
There will be many times in this book that you will shake your head and wonder “did I just read that? WTF is going on?” All of the bizarre happenings in this book took me by surprise at first, but I was so intrigued I couldn’t stop reading. I have read similar books in the past and would give up halfway through because it became too much. I wanted to follow this fever dream to its dizzying end, even though it was difficult sometimes to discern between the real and the make believe. This book is a magic concoction of “The Craft”, “Heathers”, “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, “Donnie Darko” and “Inception”.

Wanna creep out someone who's read this book? Just send them a text from an unknown number saying, "Hi, bunny! I love you, bunny!" Add a couple of unicorn or troll doll emojis.

Fun book!

This was weird. Definitely not for everyone. The gore and confusion the main character encounters is very visceral and unsettling.

Heathers meets Mean Girls. This book was so much fun to read but also reminded me why I have stayed away from the world of academia.

In case you need yet another warning never to enter an MFA program, here's Bunny. Samantha is a creative writing student at a prestigious unnamed university in New England where the professors are pretentious blowhards and her four fellow students are the epitome of Mean Girls. She even has appropriate nicknames for each of them--Cupcake, Creepy Doll, Vignette, and the Duchess--but collectively they are the Bunnies, because that's what they call each other in their sickly sweet little-girl voices. Samantha, on the other hand, is a bit of a loner loser who only has one friend, a manic-pixie-girl type named Ava. They get drunk together a lot and dance the tango on Ava's roof. Things change, though, when the Bunnies invite Samantha to join them one evening. And by "change," I mean that they get progressively weirder and weirder, until reality isn't clear anymore. If you're up for this, this is a wild ride about the process of creation and what we're willing to do in order to belong. I thought it was bizarre fun.

The Short of It:

Considered a dark comedy but I failed to see the humor.

The Rest of It:

I won’t pretend to know exactly what went on in this story because it could probably be interpreted many different ways. In fact, I’m sure the majority of it went right over my head. Not because I couldn’t lean in and decipher what exactly was taking place, but because I wasn’t motivated to do so. At all.

Samantha Heather Mackey is working on her MFA at a prestigious New England university. She’s part of a writing cohort that includes a group of girls who think alike, dress alike, and apparently, write alike. Think Heathers meets Mean Girls. There’s a lot of pink and shallowness but then there’s this writing program and the fact that they do seem to possess writing talent, which seems out of place. They refer to each other as “Bunny”. Thanks, Bunny. That was great, Bunny. You know what’s best, Bunny.

Samantha hates them, but also wants to be like them. There’s the problem.

As they begin to work together as a cohort, certain things come to light rather quickly. They have special parties that involve rabbits. These parties also involve imaginary creations of their doing. It’s like they “write” them into existence but with witchery and a lot of alcohol and drugs.

Are these things actually happening or is this a product of Samantha’s imagination? What you need to know is that there is a lot of darkness here. I saw some reviews that categorized it as a horror novel but others say dark comedy. There is nothing funny here and if you have a soft spot for furry, little rabbits this story won’t sit well with you. It’s disturbing and weird.

I like to think that what goes on in this novel IS a product of Samantha’s mad skills as a writer but I’m not so sure. It has a very Naked Lunch feel to it and the visuals are just so disturbing and nightmarish.

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3.75

This is a strange book and one I am hesitant to give too much information about because I could easily spoil it. It is a bit fantastical, a bit conceptual, a little out there. The characters are this mashing of characters from Mean Girls, Heathers, and The Craft. There is the one on the peripheral wanting to belong, and then “the others”. The ones that seem to be more of a hive mind than individualistic.

There is a lot of subtexts here. Most are rooted in feminist concepts. Some are rooted in narcissism. The rich kids imagining themselves as working class, plumbing the depths of poverty hoping it will lend them some credibility. The pat-on-the-back posturing of some of those in higher academia that think everything that comes out of their brain is visionary or deep. But mostly it was just…strange. However, it was a good kind of strange.

I think the characters were as well written as could be expected given the nature of the characters. The story was well written, although the metaphors that seem to flow frequently sometimes make you scratch your head as much as the text. Still, I really enjoyed this. I actually enjoyed Awards writing style, how the story progressed, and even the feeling after I closed the book of…'"what the hell did I just read?” This will be a polarizing read though, and not for everyone. I feel like if you were okay with something like Mindy McGinnis’ “This Darkness Mine” (which I adored) then you will possibly enjoy this.

Well this was whack...in a good way