book notes

the blurb

"A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." —Los Angeles Times
"Every time I open it up, I stumble upon a crackling sentence." —The New York Times
"Awad is a stone-cold genius." —The Washington Post
The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
"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.

a few notes

❗trigger warnings: ❗some gore, mention of drugs

POV: 1st person
setting: New England
tropes: mean girls, interpersonal relationships, dark academia
spice: 1/5
language: 2/5

mood reading: in the mood for a fever-dream read that’s open to interpretation.

awards:

• Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Horror (2018)
• New England Book Award Nominee for Fiction (2018)
• Ladies of Horror Fiction Award for Best Novel (2018)

my review

I finished this book and truly did not know what to make of it. It felt like a fever dream, one that left me asking myself, “What did I just read?” It’s the kind of book that you have to sit with for awhile, think about it, let it simmer. Even now, I’m not 100% what I think of it.

what I loved

The writing was spectacular, vivid descriptions that set the scene so well and created a truly moody, atmospheric tone. The story reminded me of both The Craft and Heathers, with a side of Mean Girls. But on much darker, more intense levels. Samantha is the outlier, as present in the three movies I mentioned, while the Bunnies are the “in” group. Despite her disdain of them, and their overly cutesie affectations, there’s little question that she’s still curious about them. The book is set at what seems to be a rather pretentious university in New England, the kind of academic world that looks down at other institutions from a position of arrogant self-importance. The Bunnies and Samantha are cohorts in the MFA program, one loftily touted as “experimental.” There is a very clear sense of academic snobbery going on here, which truly feeds the darker aspects.

As for the rest of the book, it’s very much open to interpretation, which may not be everyone’s reading cup of tea but is something I enjoy. It reads like a fever dream, with neither Samantha nor the reader really ever knowing what’s real and what isn’t, what’s little more than a hallucination or a figment of an active imagination. Even some of the characters within the story… are they real or imagined/hallucinated? Arguments could be made in either direction. Honestly, most crucial aspects of the story could be interpreted either way, including their Workshop creations. Are they real, or are they metaphors for creativity?

what I didn’t love

The YA subtext to the dynamic between Samantha and the Bunnies. The outlier becomes part of the popular group, leaves it, comes back, leaves again. And then revenge against one another ensues, with the heroine getting the final word. That felt a little juvenile for those who were supposed to be masters-level academics. As was the plethora of woman-on-woman hate that was impetus for most everything that happened. Before her induction into the group, Samantha was incredibly judgmental of them. And the Bunnies sugarcoated all their nastiness in “suggestions” and “advice.”

But what really got me was the walk down stereotypical lane. The truth of what their monstrous creations, as touted in the summary, were, why they were created. I won’t spoil it, but it was a disappointment for me. As was the fact that it was, in fact, a man that finally unraveled everything. That’s what it boiled down to, a group of women whose dynamic fell apart over a man. It felt like a monstrous betrayal to the fever dream of the rest of the book.

overall

This is a book that I feel could be read over and over again, and each time the reader would interpret it differently. Because of that, I want to read it again in the future to see if my experience with it changes. And despite the things I didn’t love about it, I think I would still highly recommend it.

About Mona Awad

Mona Awad is the bestselling author of the novels BUNNY, ROUGE, ALL’S WELL and 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL. She is a three time finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award, a finalist for the Giller Prize, and a winner of the Amazon Best First Novel Award. BUNNY was also a finalist for the New England Book Award and it won the Ladies of Horror Fiction Best Novel Award. It’s currently in development for film with Bad Robot Productions. Her forthcoming novel, WE LOVE YOU, BUNNY will be released with Simon & Schuster in September 2025.

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.

Website | Goodreads | Bookhype | Amazon

Rating Report
the story
the characters
the writing
the pacing
the world-building
the mood
the emotional significance
the conclusion
Overall:

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• 2025 Linz the Bookworm & Logophile Reading Challenge