As New York approaches another lockdown, I decided to approach a book that's been waiting patiently on my shelf for a while now. I went into this blind and expectation-less, but man am I so pleasantly freaked out by what I found inside.
Don't worry, I won't tease you any longer, Bunny. I'm talking about:
Bunny, Mona Awad
I genuinely don't know how to start this because it was such a twisting and turning, constant state of, "what the hell is going on" the entire time. What I can say, though, is that If you like bizarre page-turners, 80s movies, satire, vague tension, cultish friend groups with blonde demon leaders, miniature foods, or strangely attractive men, you. Will. Love. This.
At first, this book isn't totally crazy. For about three chapters, I thought it was just going to be an entertaining and funny social commentary piece about college, the elite, and a jab at the pretentiousness of these programs. Awad's writing style is an extremely detail and sensory-driven subtle kind of funny. She has a superpower that turns nuanced references to behaviors and situations you've never lived in relatable. Even if you've never been a student at a New England elite institution getting your masters among the upper class, you feel that energy. Understand the awkwardness. Find humor in her depiction of it.
The whole thing is set from the point of view of the main character, Samantha Mackey, and written in three distinct parts. We open with Samantha in her final year of a prestigious MFA writing program, and are made aware that she's an obvious outcast from the first page. She's the only scholarship student amongst the 1%, only has one punk of a friend, and has a pretty dark internal monologue full of sarcasm, snarky remarks, and aloofness.
There are four other female students in the program, all of which Samantha can't stand. They're an oddly touchy-feely-lovey group of grown women who fawn over, and call one another, "Bunny". The Bunny's are uncomfortably close to the point where their four characters operate as a collective "we" more than any one person. From Samantha's eyes you get a sense of who's who, but with no more personal detail than how each one dresses or which one writes about soup and which about sex.
Right around the third chapter, though, is where things immediately take a turn for the bizarre. Both in writing and in plot.
Samantha gets invited to the Bunny's "Smut Salon" and decides, against herself, to attend. At this party, there are certain aspects of the bunny's friendship and odd features of each of their personalities revealed in a "so detailed you can physically feel the awkwardness in the room coming from the page" way. Samantha-themed drinks are flowing all night, pretty standard sleepover cultish fan behavior ensues, and by the end, a real bunny is caught in the yard and Samantha travels home in a daze.
After this, Awad's writing ramps up by 10 and things both seem to not make any sense and are crystal clear at the same time.
We're taken on a journey as Samantha battles internally the intrigue of being in the Bunny's inner circle, and the disgust she knows (or thinks she knows) she feels about them deep down. She quickly gets swept up into the grandeur and games, and before she knows it, is referencing to them as "Bunny", letting them pet her hair, and joining in on group hugs in front of class, too.
By the second part of the book, you can't tell if Samantha's POV is from her eyes or that of the collective. Everything switches from "I" to "we" and her internal thoughts become jumbled with those of a Bunny. As a reader, it felt like you had fallen into the looking glass alongside her; slowly losing her grip on her own personality, thoughts, and views. Everything you thought you knew about the unreliable narrator turned on its head and you become just as lost as she. That is, until she's snapped out of it and everything changes. Again.
The first two parts of Bunny can be summed up like this: a pinch of murder, a dash of AHS Coven men conjuring spells, an LSD trip of Alice and Wonderland proportions, and a bonus bit of tense fading friendships, served up Mean Girls' Janice Ian style.
As for the third and final part... I'll leave that up to your own discovery, Bunny.
It's giving Coven meets Heathers meets Alice in Wonderland meets The Secret History meets "WTF is going on". It's strange, peculiar, bizarre, weird, confusing, interesting, unique, and one of my new top five picks.
Love it or hate it, you will read it quickly and your brain will hurt after.
Love you, Bunny! Talk soon, Bunny!
Comments