Name: Elin Keller's review of Bunny by Mona Awad
Item: Bunny
Rating: 5
Author: Elin Keller

Mona Awad

"Jon Swift + Witches of Eastwick + Kelly 'Get In Trouble' Link + Mean Girls + Creative Writing Degree Hell! No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled! O Bunny you are sooo genius!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter "A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times "Awad is a stone-cold genius." —Ann Bauer, The Washington Post The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl "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

A Novel

Bunny

The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one "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 are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become 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, a caustic art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunny cult and starts to take part in their ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they magically conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision. A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author whose work has been described as "honest, searing and necessary" (Elle).

Clark Louis

 It is such fun to brainstorm possibilities with our glitter pens. To take notes upon notes in our leather-bound notebooks with the designer tree paper! To skim the literature and movies and music and myths of the world and take only the cream. 

Erica England 

I have a vision of a Top Gun–era Tom Cruise with a harelip. His beautiful head exploding. The hail of bone, the shower of blood, the terrible brain rain from which I no longer bothered to take cover thanks to the magic Tic Tacs. And then his lovely eyeball landing in my kitten lap, blue-green as my dream of the sea, winking at me like a hard-won cat’s-eye.

Our mothers always said to look hard at the things of this world that are owies on the eyes because they will put more colors in your inner rainbow.

Bunny, you’re disgusting, we say. You’re so disgusting oh my god. But we love you anyway, Bunny, like you’re our very own sick, alienlike little baby who looks just like a gross old man the way babies can sometimes look to everyone but their mother.

mari

We all watch him chew contentedly. Then swallow. Then chew again. If we could watch him digest, we would.

Sara Poole

“Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust."

hessensitive

I love you, Bunny. And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women—my academic peers—cooingly strangle each other hello.

They each look at Ava, then at me, in turn, scanning down from our heads to our feet, their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks. As they do, their noses twitch, their eight eyes do not blink, but stare and stare. Then they look back at the Duchess and lean in to each other, their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words. Ava squeezes my arm, hard. The Duchess turns and arches an eyebrow at us. She raises a hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says. My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my mouth, even though no sound comes out. Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.

Or is it our amazingly empathic hive mind that we make by hugging so that we become one of those animals with a brain and heart in each tentacle that connects to a bigger, cosmic heart-brain that is like a shared, all-seeing third eye? Who knows? Who cares?

Like we could hug and hug and hug until our ribs crack and our hearts burst and our lungs collapse and our arms break off and still. We’d still be hugging air. No body.

We huddle-hug on the velvety green among the cherry blossom trees. We link arms. We close our eyes the better to feel each other's bodies. We form a hot little circle of love and understanding. We press our faces into our faces, our cheeks against our cheeks, our eyelashes tickling our skins like little hummingbird wings, like Bunny nose twitches.

Samantha Heather Mackey thinks her stories are so fucking great! Samantha Heather Mackey doesn't say it but she thinks she's too good for the whole fucking world! Samantha Heather Mackey acts poor but why then does she behave like a princess? Samantha Heather Mackey slept with her professor! Sucked him off! For preferential treatment! There is no way in hell that Samantha Heather Mackey can be that tall, she wears stilts! Samantha Heather wears stilts so she can look down on us! Oh, ho, ho, ho she loves fucking second of that!! Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn't make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes. Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our hearts our heart our heart! We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.

Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.

Lindy

I think of that spring morning, just before dawn. How she appeared at my side on the bench. How I felt so suddenly alive with possibility. Saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person I knew in my bones would be someone I'd love. How I had no idea. How the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing.

Walking, I know exactly where, to exactly which lacquered front door. His destination is in my blood. His intention is in my heart.

The world goes from dark pink to a gray-white hellscape under grimy diner lights. She's the only beautiful thing in it.

shelley

They glare at me. Or try to. It's hard for them. Very hard with all the Tic Tac painkillers taking away their edges. Leaving them suspended and floating, possibly forever, in the mist, in the rainbow sky.

Perfect flakes falling on her perfect house, its towers, actual towers, shining white and pointy as teeth under a perfect moon.

I gaze up at its long, pink plastic body in the center of the stand. Emblazoned with hearts. Frozen in midprance. Its large, ever-smiling eyes full of sparkles. "Pinkie Pie," I whisper.

Emiley Jones

When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking.

 makes it sound like a cave. Like some hideous, dark cave whose oozing walls are teeming with all the unpleasant things of this world, and I am crawling willingly, brazenly, into this awful space of my own free will. Shoveling the vermin I find scuttling across the floor into my mouth for sustenance.

I look up; they're all staring at me with their fairy eyes. Fucking with me. They have to be. And yet I feel those eyes all over my soul, plundering whatever pain and want they imagine lives there. That made them keep their distance all year last year. That somehow draws them in now. A pea to put under their twenty mattresses, which they can feel in the night, something from Down There, where they think, where I have somehow given the impression, I live.

But know what, exactly? What is there to really know? Sometimes when I tell myself or Ava the story, it grows teeth and it's something. Definitely something. Other times, it comes apart in my hands like air. But if I remember all the right details. If I tell them in the right order. If I pause in the right places, trail off in the right places…

mallorie 🦌

When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking. He smiles. Light on green leaves. Me looking up at the fast-moving clouds, the damp grass on my back. The smell of wet budding flowers all around me. I'm fifteen.

Elin Keller

I'm still processing it.. do i laugh or do i weep, i don't really know?

march🐇

This is like the My Immortal of books paying homage to The Secret History. Magic realism doesn't work if the framework for the characters and setting are not strong enough. Some satire and criticism of MFA programs--which isn't unwarranted--but this book's criticisms were overbearing and a slog to get through. The book REALLY wants you to know it's chock-full of 

. Was weird and threw in horror elements just for the sake of being weird and having horror elements. Tired gendered critiques. Plot gets completely uncertain of itself toward the end.

 also just reads like the author has a chip on their shoulder. I love unlikeable characters, but I did not 

 in Samantha and couldn't buy her "not like other girls" characterization. For the schizophrenia interpretations--this is a poor interpretation. Rather than sparkling with sharp wittiness, the story comes off as immature.

dagonet

This is like the My Immortal of books paying homage to The Secret History. Magic realism doesn't work if the framework for the characters and setting are not strong enough. Some satire and criticism of MFA programs--which isn't unwarranted--but this book's criticisms were overbearing and a slog to get through. The book REALLY wants you to know it's chock-full of symbolism. Was weird and threw in horror elements just for the sake of being weird and having horror elements. Tired gendered critiques. Plot gets completely uncertain of itself toward the end.

It also just reads like the author has a chip on their shoulder. I love unlikeable characters, but I did not believe in Samantha and couldn't buy her "not like other girls" characterization. For the schizophrenia interpretations--this is a poor interpretation. Rather than sparkling with sharp wittiness, the story comes off as immature.

Would have loved this if I were 17.

Romy

well this was definitely a fucking ride oh my god

nina 

marlisa

“The Secret History meets Jennifer’s Body. This brilliant, sharp, weird book skewers the heightened rhetoric of obsessive female friendship in a way I don’t think I've ever seen before. I loved it and I couldn’t put it down.” - Kristen Roupenian, author of You Know You Want This: "Cat Person" and Other Stories The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one. "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 different from the other members of her master's program at New England's elite Warren University. A self-conscious scholarship student who prefers the company of her 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 are often found entangled in a group hug so tight it seems their bodies might become permanently fused. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' exclusive monthly "Smut Salon," and finds herself drawn as if by magic to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, an audacious art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into Bunny world, and starts to take part in the off-campus "Workshop" where they devise their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision. A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale about loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and female friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author with tremendous "insight into the often-baffling complexities of being a woman" (The Atlantic).

Angeleeka

one of my ABSOLUTE favorites ! i enjoyed the writing style so much it’s insane and it’s also so uniquely terrifying … I JUST LOVE HUMOROUS HORROR 

The Otessa Moshfegh comparisons and Margaret Atwood approval had me hyped but I think those references set up false expectations for what this was. 

Jacob Reader

I love that it’s so confusing but sometimes it’s too confusing yk 

Honey cocoa 

And oh love seems so fragile, lost and corrupt yet it was fresh and close 

Claire Maguet

Great if you are 14 and not like other girls

This book is what I imagine it feels like to be on drugs. It is so far from what I was expecting but so good at the same time. Not my usual choice of genre but it had me so excited to know what happened next. The twist at the end was a little brain-warping but such a good ending!

Soph

At no point did I have a clue what was going on and I love it for that. 

Mckenzie Collard

Laoise Giblin

'No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled. O Bunnyyou are sooo genius!' MARGARET ATWOOD. We call them Bunnies because that is what they call each other. Seriously. Bunny. Samantha Heather Mackey is an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at Warren University. In fact, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort - a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other 'Bunny'. But then the Bunnies issue her with an invitation and Samantha finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door, across the threshold, and down their rabbit hole. Blending sharp satire with fairytale horror, Bunnyis a spellbinding trip of a novel from one of fiction's most original new voices. 'A brilliant, utterly unique peek into the dark side of female friendship' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT. 'Made me nod and cackle in terrified recognition' LENA DUNHAM. 'Hilarious and subversive, magical and knife-sharp' LAURA VAN DEN BERG. 'Cerebral and compulsively readable' VANITY FAIR. 'Enchanting and stunningly bizarre' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

*stumbles out of this book covered in blood

3.8 

*stumbles out of this book covered in blood* lawrd what the hell was that!

first buddy read with nica !! @maisonnica 🐇💗

Nica

3.8

first buddy read w/ ari ! @jellypoppd 

(makeover of the mean girls trope, or HS cliques turned up to eleven)

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

🐇

🌷

🧌

🪓

👻

In the words of Ava. . what a fucking shitshow ---

(makeover of the mean girls trope, or HS cliques turned up to eleven)


• Obviously up for personal interpretation, with all the themes of symbolism sprinkled throughout. Though, sometimes, leaving a reader with unanswered questions can feel somewhat like a cop out. (Surprisingly) this one just wasn't my cuppa. .

• Unpopular opinion, but, it felt lacking - with seemingly trying too hard + parts really dragged/felt repetitive; while never really living up to the hype (again, imo, doesn't make it bad, or mean you won't enjoy it yourself).

• It loosely draws inspiration from Mona Awad's own experiences in an MFA program, albeit exaggerated for dark comedic effect; blending academic satire/psychological horror, with a sharp turn towards magical realism.

• Bringing forth commentary on the (sometimes) toxic nature of creative communities/corruption of creative impulses. The "workshop" (both), serving an affect of religious ritual/cult-like behavior.

• The novel's premise explores themes of alienation/desire for acceptance and belonging; while losing one's self along the way (holds a fun house mirror up to our own desires/insecurities).

Having said that, while I'm fond of stories that aren't straightforward/linear, or make sense all the way through, and with its style, invoking similar feels I had with Shutter Island; ultimately, this still isn't one I would recommend or even go for a reread. . 🤷🏼‍♀️

Cici Pearson

I think maybe I’m not intellectual enough to enjoy this book. However, I am glad I listened to it instead of reading the physical copy myself. If I had, I probably would’ve DNF’d it. Might be a book for you it’s just not for me. 

Gina Crane 

weirdest book i’ve ever read, more so than piranesi. genuinely i was so intrigued the whole time. the writing style was so amazing, mona awad is definitely up there with rf kuang, susanna clarke, and erin morgenstern in terms of amazing writing style for me. the story was odd but emotional, the way she describes sam’s train of thoughts were so interesting, it really teeters between real and illusion. overall 10/10 book 

violet nguyen

rory

خير

this was a fever dream that just wasn’t for me. The “it was all my imagination/dream” always immediately turns me off

Elin Keller &
Bunny by Mona Awad

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Elin Keller &
Bunny by Mona Awad