Bunny by Mona Awad book review

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*** Spoiler warning***

Duh…

Awad’s novel follows outsider Samantha Mackey, who is an MFA student at Warren University, when she gets drawn into a clique of hyper-feminine, rich girls called “Bunnies’. Samantha, also known as Mackie, discovers that the bunnies have a dark secret: they perform occult rituals to transform rabbits into beautiful, monstrous boys (Darlings). The story blends dark academia, horror, and satire, blurring the lines of reality and creative liberty. Samantha grapples with belonging, creativity, and her own magical abilities (like creating her best friend Ava from imagination) while navigating the Bunnies’ increasingly surreal and violent world.

Awad was able to encapsulate the desperate loneliness of the young female that contradicts with the desire to stand out and be an individual. Samantha, our narrator in this story, is used to symbolise this contradictory duality that exists in a lot of young women.  Samantha cannot stand the clique of pretentious, fake-nice rich girls who make up her writing group, who are collectively given the nickname “Bunnies”. This is after the cute pet name that they use for each other. For the first time Samantha gets invited to one of their “Smut Salons” and indoctrinated into their group/cult. These group meet ups are not about meeting up and talking about sexy smut books. They are planned events where the Bunnies turn real life bunnies into sexy men “Darlings” whom shower the Bunnies with empty compliments.

Samantha is your typical edgy, anti-social loner. She prefers her own dark imagination to spending any time with other people, the only exception being her best and only friend, Ava. She keeps a barrier between her and the rest of the women in the book though the use of snarky and judgemental comments. For most of the other characters, Samantha refers to them in a dehumanising nickname like “Duchess, Cup Cake, Vignette and Creepy Doll” for the bunnies and “Fosco and the Lion” for here professors. However, Samantha accepts the invitation because she is aware that her loneliness and awareness that her isolation is ultimately not healthy for her mentally or academically. In contrast, we have the Bunnies. The Bunnies are a quartet of privileged white women who shower each other with compliments and hug each other with such intensity they come across as insincere. There are critics that surround the misogynistic description of the Bunnies but I believe this is intentional as a symptom of Samantha’s dark and hateful state of mind.

I adore Awad’s work and was first introduced to her when I came across her book Rouge. Awad can capture the surreal and ground it with reality and the reader can feel the extensive research that was worked on to develop this novel. Any of Awad’s novels in fact. Bunny is just an exceptional piece of modern gothic fiction that centralises its focus on women and their relationship with each other.  

I give it 5/5! A must read.