Bunny
Ratings422
Average rating3.5
1/5
DNF after getting halfway. I just really couldn't get into it. It's boring, bizarre and I hated all of the characters except Jonah who was in like 10 pages total.
really really weird but I vibe with it.
reminded me of myself in some uncomfortable ways.
I wasn't sure until the very end of this book whether I hated it or loved it. Turns out I loved it. I can't describe it without spoilers, so I'll just leave it at that.
3.5 - soooo yeah it's weird, it's obscure, it's up for interpretation lol I think I'll have to re-read but literally after the last sentence I said, out loud... what? utterly confused face
Comme beaucoup l'ont dit, c'était une lecture vraiment bizarre, inégale mais malgré tout intrigante. La frontière entre l'imagination et le réel est très floue, ce qui amène quelques questions sans réponse, comme la fin. Est-ce que Jonah, en bout de ligne, est aussi une création de Sam? Est-ce que tout ce qui concerne la magie, les hybrides, bref tout ce qui n'est pas normal dans la réalité n'était que l'histoire de Samantha pour son mémoire, comme quelqu'un l'a mentionné?
Tout de même, l'écriture en elle-même est belle et sensuelle. Je pourrais sûrement lire autre chose de l'autrice si l'histoire m'intéresse.
had a great time read reading this booook!!! the mix between magical realism and academia really scratched an itch. I had a lot of fun and this feels like it'll be a fantastic reread :D.
I enjoyed this book. I think the writing style wasn't really for me but I was curious the entire time reading that I loved the story. I do not have any experience of a graduate program, let alone a writing cohort, but this book made me wonder about the people who are in those cohorts and such.
I would not recommend this book for just anyone. Super strange, and if you are not into that, it isn't for you.
This book made me so angry. I do feel like there's something there about desire, that these girls can grant any of their own darkest desires but still come up with these like unthreatening neutered ken doll Disney princes, but the story doesn't really engage with that. Instead it delves into this extremely unrelatable portrait of female friendship where the main character hates the Bunnies while simultaneously being desperate for their approval (if they're so stupid why do you care if they don't like your story?????).
There is this bizarre extended sequence near the end that involves a twisted hallucination of two characters critiquing the book and honestly I agreed with everything they said so clearly this book was not for me.
2021 Review:
This book was nothing and everything like I expected. But it surely was what I wanted it to be.
2023 Review:
So I read this as a buddy read and having read it before I was ready with all my annotation supplies. Well I think I went a little crazy trying to analyse this story, I truly felt like a conspiracy theorist.
The book lets you think you understand at least some part of it and then throws you for another loop.
If I described this book in three words, those would be:
- Desire
- Loneliness
- Spellbinding
These all come through in and from the main character, Samantha.
Bunny by Mona Awad is a creative and compelling story about friendship, love, grad school, being a writer, and ultimately the stories we tell and inhabit. Samantha is an MFA candidate at Warren, but she isn't like the other women in her cohort. No, those women who call each other “Bunny” a clique to which Samantha does not belong. But in her final year of grad school she is invited to join the Bunny cult, and everything changes. My feelings about this book are mixed. On one hand there's a lot of important, compelling, and interesting ideas about friendship, creativity, gender, education, etc. There's also a lot of cool plot elements which seem to blend dark academia, psychological horror, and maybe even bits of other sub genres. On the other hand I found the book to be a bit confusing. Some parts of the logic and mechanics never seemed to be totally explained, probably intentionally, and Part 3 got really weird really fast. I'm not always the biggest fan of unreliable narrators or works that are intentionally unclear, and maybe that's simply my insecurity with the unpredictable and multifaceted complexity of the human experience...or something, but toward the end this book got a little muddy. The twists and turns and layers were thrilling, but at the end of the book I'm not completely sure I understand what actually happened. I guess that space of uncertainty and invitation to participate in writing my own interpretation of the novel is a valid takeaway, but at the same time I was also left with unsettling ambiguity and a longing for clarity. Maybe that was part of Awad's intention for the book? In any event, this is a good one even if somewhat confusing. Great especially for anyone who's gone through a creative graduate school program. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I shouldn't have liked this as much as I did, I reckon. But like it I did.
Yes, I was baffled by the Bunnies, because their interests were more in line with things I like, their clothes were quirkier than I would expect such students would have. But they were awful rich people. But one seemed punkish, and another seemed Gothic Lolita, and that was just a weird choice. It didn't feel realistic.
THAT being said. This book was too much fun. I chuckled grimly to myself multiple times. I felt for Samantha's loneliness. I actually kinda figured out what was going on with her and Ava, but the outcome of it all was still a surprise.
Yes, this is litfic. And I normally hate litfic. It's boring and pretentious. But every once in a while, I come a cross a litfic book that is just so delightful I cannot hate it. I find myself really enjoying it. And this was the one for the spring.
One phase describes this book: “What the heck did I just read?” Reading the reviews of this book, I question if I read the same book as everyone else. This dark academia books combines a girly cult, boys made out of bunnies, a self-loathing main character, and gory horror. This book made me itch and want out, but at the same time, I couldn't put it down. So much emotion, so much confusions, so much reading. I mean who goes to college for poetry anyways?
2.5 stars. This was just bizarre. It's very cerebral and symbolic and maybe my exhausted little mind didn't quite appreciate it as it would have when I was a university student. I did enjoy the way Awad poked fun at The Arts and the ‘academic wankers' as we used to call them (people who got off on their own intellectual brilliance).
I feel like this book is marked as a book about a weird group of girls, who call each other “bunny”, but it's so much more than that.
This would've sufficed as a short story rather than an entire novel, but that wouldn't change the fact that the writing is immature and sickly.
hard to rate. one of those books that stick to your mind and you realise so many of the details are worthy of deeper analysis. but man all the characters are written like high school mean girls
One sentence synopsis... An outsider at a prestigious New England college finds herself in the thrall of a clique of four women who love Pinkberry yogurt, experimental prose, calling each other ‘Bunny', and performing dark magic to manifest their dream boys.
Read it if you like... ‘Heathers', ‘Carrie', ‘AHS: Coven', ‘Scream Queens' or ‘Jennifer's Body'. Dark comedy with an academic setting and dash of horror.
Dream casting... Emma Mackey as the Veronica/Cady Heron of the group, Samantha.
Ottessa Moshfegh x Chuck Palahniuk x Meg Cabot? Creative and visceral. A little redundant but shortcut-pithy at the same time. Author did a great job at establishing nightmarishness/reality confusion.
Spoilers: Had a hard time at the beginning because I generally don't like when a POV character is reductively judgmental in a way that's elitist and antifeminist, until I can tell for sure the author isn't using the POV as a vector to trash the target people. Unclear how much that was a goal here, but the trait seems like it was mostly meant to be a character development anchor and paint a vivid picture. I love/hate theory so I enjoyed the jabs at it within the story shaped by it. Unfamiliar with literary world drama, sure I missed some stuff because of this.
Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, you know?
this review can also be found on my blog.
i wish i had liked this more because it had a lot of potential. i just found it to be a little too disjointed for my tastes. i was at a loss a lot of the time and didn't feel like the journey was fully worth the destination – as great as i found that destination to be. i even put this down for a few days because i was just bored reading it, which is a shame considering how wild the content itself is. i do think it's worth giving a shot if the premise intrigues you, even if it didn't work for me personally.
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