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. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunnies, the boundary between fiction and reality begins to blur.
This book was gifted to me last Christmas and it has been languishing on my TBR ever since. I read it just before Christmas to finish off a couple of Goodreads challenges because it is a book that everyone seems to have been talking about and I needed to know why.
This book definitely wins the award for the weirdest book I read in 2024. I’m still not sure that I fully grasped everything that was going on but it isn’t a book that I will read again – I’ve already added it to my Little Free Library to disturb and confound another unsuspecting reader – so I’ll have to be content with what I gleaned from it on the first go round. I’ll do my best to convey what this book is about and my feelings on it, but no promises that it will be coherent!
Samantha is an outcast at her posh university, the only one of a small cohort who isn’t the product of a glossy private education and family wealth. She is resigned to this situation until the ‘Bunnies’ as she calls the other four girls in her class suddenly decide to initiate her into their clique, but she could not prepare herself for their weird rituals and obsessions.
This book is Mean Girls on acid. That is the most succinct description of this book and pretty neatly sums it up. The story is about conformity, class divides, female toxicity, being true to yourself with a healthy dose of mental illness. It is deeply weird and disturbing but oddly addictive and compelling. I can’t tell you I enjoyed it but I certainly could not put it down before I finished it. I would not pick it up again though, I’m one and done on this book.
I can’t even really put this into a particular genre. It’s not YA. It’s dark academia mixed with magical realism and a massive dose of cynicism. It is ugly and disturbing with an uncomfortable vein of truth running through the female relationships and it is a book that will likely haunt you long after you have finished it. One possibly for fans of The Four. People will love it or hate it, decide for yourself.
Bunny is out now in all formats and you can buy it here.
About the Author
Mona Awad is the author of Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. It is currently optioned for film with Bad Robot Productions. Awad’s debut, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel, All’s Well, was longlisted for the International Dublin Award and a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror. Rouge, her fourth novel, is forthcoming September 2023 with Simon & Schuster. She teaches fiction in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.
Connect with Mona:
Website: http://monaawadauthor.com/welcome
