Bunny| AT A GLANCE

Title: Bunny

Author: Mona Awad

Published:  June 11th 2019 by Viking

Pages: 320

Genre: Fiction, Horror, Contemporary Fiction

Goodreads Rating: 3.67

Synopsis

“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.”

My Thoughts

Okay, so I’m going to be the first to say that I’m not entirely sure what I read. I had to wait a week or so to even attempt to write this review on Bunny. To quote what one of the characters say towards the end of the book, “JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS.”

The book starts off fairly tame. Samantha is an outsider in her graduate courses, which happens to be the first all female cohort. She has exactly one friend and doesn’t quite fit in within the Warren elite. She especially doesn’t fit in with The Bunnies, which is the name the other girls in her co-hort have given themselves. The Bunnies are a sorority of sorts. They call themselves the Bunnies. And I mean they literally all call each other ‘Bunny’. They’re obsessed with declaring their love for one and other, complimenting each other, love to eat anything mini in size (think mini hamburgers), and one is never seen without the others. As an outsider Samantha finds The Bunnies to be disgusting, and yet she dreams to be included.

When Samantha is finally invited into the club she discovers that these sorority sisters are more cult than sorority. As Samantha dives deeper into the realm of the Bunnies, their cutesy personalities morph into something a little more extreme, something with a tint of horror, blood, & power.

Even with the darkness, the Bunnies are tied as my favorite villains at the moment with Professor Umbridge from Harry Potter. They both love pink, cutesy things, and both have a very dark sense of what’s right. The Bunnies are obssesive, with each other and other cute things. Think Mean Girls meets Heathers, except these girls are highly intelligent who seek power and maybe a little blood.

This book is a lot to handle. I mean ALOT. I often found myself thinking, “is this what it feels like to take hallucinogenics?” I couldn’t stop reading this book, even if I didn’t know what was going on (which only happened every other chapter). This book is trips, dreamy, high energy, superbly written, creative, and creepy. The mixture of Heathers and Mean Girls doesn’t do this book justice though, and to get the full effect of what you’ll be getting into, imagine the added ingredients of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina & Alice in Wonderland to the mix! Get it HERE!

★★★★