|Page Turners| Bunny by Mona Awad

Bunny by Mona Awad was my book club's pick for October, and was meant to be a bit of a creepy read. In that aspect, Bunny did not disappoint. It is, without doubt, the most disturbing book I have ever read. The story takes place inside Warren, a MFA program in a New England university and follows Samantha, a young woman and student in the MFA program, as she gets more and more entangled with the group of women called "Bunnies". Not quite real, the novel leaves you feeling like you just don't know what's going on.

Do We Want to Turn the Page?

Warning! This next section may contain spoilers about the book. Also, all ratings are based entirely on my opinion and WILL be biased and subjective.

I think it's fair to say that I hated this book. Bunny left me feeling like a disturbed mess, creeped out by the weird cults of Warren and yet feeling like I was missing a key piece of the puzzle. That's not to say no one will enjoy this book, because some definitely will, but it was not for me. One of the only parts I enjoyed was the writing, which was great, but it was completely overshadowed by the plot, which was not only strange, but also confusing. It is never explained how Samantha went from absolutely despising the Bunnies to suddenly being part of their clique, with the novel just going from part 1 to part 2 with no explanation. Ultimately, the biggest let down was the ending. I am not even going to try to explain what went down at the end, because I am incapable. From Ava being a swan to "Max" attempting to kill the Bunnies, I was left with no sense of what was transpiring, and the ending just further cemented that this was not a book for me. Maybe someone else could enjoy the novel, but be warned, it is disturbing. For me, this has to be a 1/5 stars.

The Summary:

We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

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.

The Author:

Mona Awad is the author of BUNNY, ALL'S WELL and 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL. 13 WAYS won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Her second novel, BUNNY, was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror, the New England Book Award, and won the Ladies of Horror Fiction Best Novel Award. It is currently being optioned for film with Bad Robot Productions. ALL'S WELL was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror. Her new novel, ROUGE, is forthcoming in September 2023 with Simon & Schuster. She earned an MFA from Brown University and an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation was on fear in the fairy tale. In 2018, she completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Denver. She currently teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and lives in Boston.