Bunny by Mona Awad Review

Hi, Bunny!

This past week, I read Bunny by Mona Awad. I’ve been in kind of a reading slump for the past year, but this book gave me the spark I needed to get me back into reading. I started the book Wednesday night and finished it Friday night. It’s been on my list of books I want to read for a while, and I’m so happy I finally read it. An old friend from high school told me it was “like Heathers dialed up to a thousand,” so naturally, I started it the next day.

The book follows protagonist Samantha Mackey, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student trying to earn an MFA in Creative Writing (I think she calls it Narrative Writing though). I felt a kind of connection to Samantha. I’m also twenty-five and I also went to graduate school and got an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. I understand some of the issues she goes through. I too lived in apartments that were on the brink of collapse while trying to earn a degree I never thought possible for myself. I’ve also been through the ups and downs of the triumphant and disappointing critiques my writing faced from peers and teachers. I also can relate to the slump of having a creative block during a critical time in your budding career where your writing should flourish but doesn’t. Even though I have common ground with Samantha, I also found myself disconnecting from her.

There’s a group of four girls in Samantha’s classes who she calls “the bunnies.” She’s donned this nickname for them because when the girls address each other, they use the nickname “bunny.” These girls are very close with one another, often showing PDA and using baby voices to speak with one another. She has also given each girl their own individual nickname. Caroline, who she calls “Cupcake,” earned her nickname for smelling and dressing like a cupcake. Samantha calls Kira “Creepy Doll,” because she reminds her of a literal creepy doll. Victoria, or “Vignette” according to Samantha, got her nickname for her writing style and candid personality. Eleanor is a rich, spoiled girl who depicts her wealth through her personality and physical appearance, so Samantha calls her the “Duchess.” Throughout the novel, you can tell that the Duchess is also the main leader in the group. The other bunnies constantly look to her for approval and direction.

Samantha claims that she hates the bunnies and can’t stand their behavior with each other, but I was able to pick up very quickly that she is actually jealous of their companionship and feels left out of it. Samantha and the bunnies are the only people in her writing workshop, and she feels like an outsider being that they’re so close with one another and she’s not a part of it. She often talks about how lonely she is, and especially was before she met her only friend, Ava. Ava is as blunt and straight-forward as they come, and she enjoys being an outsider compared to Samantha who often seeks validation. Ava is described as dressing gothic with lace gloves, veils, torn dresses, and dark makeup. She also has two different colored eyes, one brown and one blue, which adds to her uniqueness. Both of the girls are lower-middle-class, compared to the upper-class, wealthy bunnies, who they talk poorly about and make fun of together. They spend all of their time together and basically live together. They also dance the tango together and pretend to be a man they’ve concocted for each other, taking turns leading. Their relationship reminds me of the type of friendship where people think you’re dating, but you’re not. No matter how much she loves Ava and cherishes their friendship, it still isn’t enough, and Samantha still wants to be a part of the bunnies.

When Samantha is finally invited to hang out with the bunnies, she goes, creating tension between Ava and herself. When she gets to the house, she realizes that the bunnies are reading smut literature together at something they like to call the “Smut Salon,” where they have a bunch of different books on the living room table. Something that stood out to me was that they had a book by the Marquis de Sade, whose name inspired the term Sadism because of how darkly erotic his works were, often depicting brutal torture. If you need an example, he wrote 120 Days of Sodom which was made into a movie, which is on lists for the most disturbing films and is banned in multiple countries. I’ve never read it or watched the movie and probably never will. So yeah, when Samantha says she saw a book with his name I knew that there was something up messed up about the bunnies.

This first night with the bunnies begins her indoctrination into their group. They give her a really strong drink that’s green, so my first thought was that they were having her drink absinthe, a strong alcohol that is said to make you hallucinate and is often presented as having a green color. They get her to tell a personal story about herself instead of her reading a sexual passage of a book like the rest of them did. She cries in front of them after telling her story, and they console her. They make her feel wanted and accepted, which is everything she wants. When she wakes up in her bed the next morning, she’s wearing Creepy Doll’s red cloak, and she smells cinnamon and baked lemony sugar. She’s left with the remnants of the bunnies, as if she’s all of them. She also starts to get stalked by actual bunnies around her campus and the surrounding town, beginning with one watching her from outside her apartment window that morning.

I do think that the green drink was absinthe, because the next morning she describes what sounds like a hallucination. She says, “At which point the room began to sway like it was dancing, the pastel furniture began to change shape. Their shadows on the wall seemed to stretch. Their hair grew shinier and longer, their eyes red, and I did not know which small hand belonged to which pink-and-white body, which coo came from which glossy mouth, which fingers were getting tangled in my hair” (49). When she gets to her writing workshop, she’s hungover, but miraculously the bunnies are not. Did the bunnies not drink, but got her really drunk to make it easier to manipulate her?

For the rest of the day, Samantha goes back and forth between wanting to meet with the bunnies again and maybe not seeing them outside of class ever again. She’s so desperate to see Ava but can’t find her anywhere. She finally realizes that she’ll see her at their tango class. When they talk, she apologizes to Ava for ditching her to be with the bunnies. Even though Ava says she’s not mad at her, Samantha is still so consumed with the guilt of being a bad friend that she doesn’t believe her.

After getting into another tiff with Ava, Samantha runs away crying and goes back to the bunnies. They give her a dress to wear and braid her hair. When Samantha looks in the mirror, she says, “In it is a woman I do not recognize” (83). The bunnies dress her like them, give her alcohol, and give her a surprise that changes everything.

I don’t want to spoil any details, so I’m going to stop talking about the plot. All I’ll give away is that someone should’ve notified PETA!

One thing I do want to bring up though, is that when the bunnies want her to be in their group, Creepy Doll gives Samantha her pink sunglasses to wear. Her whole time where she feels and thinks like a bunny, she is wearing these pink sunglasses. It reminds me of that phrase of “seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses.” She doesn’t realize she’s still wearing them until her cult mentality wears off.

The cult mentality of the bunnies is prominent throughout the book. Samantha often describes them as one being with eight eyes who move and speak as one. When she’s a bunny herself, the book is like a fever dream, where all of the bunnies are nameless except for “Bunny.” It’s hard to decipher who’s speaking and who their speaking too. All you can do is assume from descriptions and what they’re saying.

I feel like an important quote from the book is, “How much did I invent in the end? Probably a lot. 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” (47). It brings into question: how reliable is Samantha as a narrator? If she admits that she makes up details to make her stories and life seem more interesting, then how much of what is going on is true and how much is made up? At the end of the book, there’s a plot twist that’s so wild, I feel like no one could guess that it’s coming during a first read.

I wouldn’t say this is my favorite book of all time, but I do think it’s a super entertaining read. I literally read it in two and half days, because I wanted to know what was happening. I think that I’d enjoy it even more on a second read. Now I have the urge to call everyone “Bunny!”

For the page references, I read the book on my Kindle, so they correspond to the Kindle edition.

If you read Bunny, let me know what you think! I’d love to chat about it and hear other ideas about the book. You can also follow me on Goodreads!

See you later, Bunny!