BOOK 247: BUNNY: MONA AWAD

We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

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.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library

(From Goodreads)

MY VERDICT: I wanted to like this book, with so much praise behind it I was expecting something interesting, unfortunately I was disappointed. I liked the premise, however, I felt that it was not very well written, the writing wasn’t good enough to make the characters feel real or any of the more fantastical aspects of the story ring true. I found myself rushing to finish the book hoping the end would pay off and it did not. Some of the visuals were interesting, there were some interesting ideas but the end took a long time to get to and wasn’t believable or real enough to be bothered with. I want to clarify when I say real I’m not talking about ‘something that can happen in real life’. I don’t hate something because its not within the bounds of reality – in fact I love something which pushes those boundaries, the imagination can be boundless, but if someone writes a book about something unreal I want them to write about it as if it happened and so I believe that within this story it did. You create rules that your unreal scenario follows so it doesn’t sound like you’re making it up as you go along. I didn’t feel the reality of the book and I didn’t enjoy learning about any of the characters in the way I usually do. I think to summarise this book I would say, interesting ideas but badly executed, dare I use the word basic? Err, yes, I think I will…

It’s a shame because for this book I didn’t really like I designed one of my favourite book covers. Ironic I guess.