Review of “Bunny” by Mona Awad
I don’t normally read horror or suspense books, so this is a really new genre for me. But this book was very imaginative and a lot of fun.
The non-spoiler section of this review will naturally have to be pretty short, given that this book is all about the suspense. It starts with a pretty simple us-vs.-them narrative: protagonist Samantha and her friend Ava are “not like other girls.” The “other girls” in this case are the Bunnies—a clique of four hyper-feminine, rich, beautiful students in Samantha’s MFA program. The author purposely plays up the archetypes, both for comic effect and to deepen the uncanny valley—the Bunnies talk in ridiculous little-girl language, eat miniature food, and wear cupcake dresses, while cynical, mature Samantha and Ava scorn them. I listened to this book on audio and the reader did a fantastic job of making the Bunnies so sweet it hurt my teeth to hear their lines sometimes.
I am also realizing I have a deep affection for books set in super specific academic programs and should seek them out more. (If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio is the other one I’ve read, and it’s excellent.) Awad uses the setting of the MFA program to truly hilarious and wonderful effect. Honestly, it kind of makes me wonder if she hated her own MFA program given how this book mocks basically everyone involved in an MFA program. I can tell you from my own experience at engineering grad school that programs attract “types” and have distinct cultures, and it’s very easy to feel like you don’t fit in—even if, as I did, you actually like the people around you and develop close friendships with them. I love the way Awad fits in the MFA—the book isn’t “about” Samantha seeking her degree or anything that concrete, but the MFA setting deeply matters to both the characterization and the humor.
My major criticism of this book is the repetitiveness of the writing. It’s to enhance the eerie effect, but it finally got to be too much. Lots of repetition of specific actions, lots of phrase structure echoed, like “She waved, and waved, and waved. And I waved, and waved, and waved back,” or “They are too cute. They are too perfect.” It’s hard to convey exactly how grating that gets in this book review alone, but try narrating your actions or describing the people around you to yourself like that sometime. (Or don’t. Maybe you can just guess without torturing yourself that much.) It gets pretty rough.
The funniest thing about the book to me was the number of Goodreads reviewers saying they were confused and didn’t get what happened by the end. Yeah. I think that was the goal. Would bet that the author herself didn’t necessarily have a neat explanation.
The main non-spoilers thing I can say about this book is that if you like the idea of a slightly more fantastical Heathers, give this a shot.
Now commence the spoilers; click here to skip to final thoughts.
This book is about a clique of girls who can turn animals into sort-of people on purpose, and our narrator Samantha, who can do it much better and create “real” people, but only by accident and unknowingly.
The characterization in this book is deeply fascinating, particularly the comparison between Samantha and Ava. I think it’s a credit to this book that, although Samantha is a very bland character with very little personality, I didn’t even notice that about her for the first half of the book. Her best friend, by contrast, seems to have so much personality, despite the little we see into her head. Samantha wants to think like Ava, wants to emulate Ava, wishes she could pull off the daring styles Ava does…basically, she wants to be around Ava because Ava makes her feel more like a person and inspires her to try to be more of a person.
So it’s a pretty great twist when it turns out that Samantha created Ava.
Samantha wills Ava into being, and when Samantha learns this at the end of the book, she realizes Ava’s creation stemmed from her, Samantha’s, loneliness. The part that Samantha doesn’t seem to recognize is that Ava’s creation also stemmed from Samantha’s deep insecurity and inability to fully express herself. We get physical descriptions of Ava and the Bunnies, but the most we know about what Samantha looks like is that, in the most typical of all clichés, she constantly lets a wing of her hair fall across her face to obscure herself. Samantha didn’t just project a friend into existence, she projected her most ideal self into existence. Ava and Samantha have the same opinions, but Ava voices them. They have the same aesthetic sensibility, but Ava wears it. Samantha also wills a gorgeous man into existence, and Ava is the one who winds up dating him.
There are so many interesting aspects to the story revolving around Samantha’s creations. Ava doesn’t know she’s a construct, but Samantha’s second construct, Max, does know—and can communicate with Samantha telepathically. Also, all the constructs die when hit with an axe (I mean, no shade, I would too) except for Max. Max turns back into a perfectly healthy stag. The whole thing has a kind of dream logic to it; in real life people with no personal histories who just appear out of thin air would struggle to participate in society, but Ava has a full wardrobe, takes a tango class, and generally just acts in ways that require you to have boring things like bank accounts and credit cards. The author might be able to make something up if pressed about the details of Ava’s existence, but it doesn’t actually matter to how much I was pulled into the story. Likewise, there’s no explanation for why Samantha and four other random women in her class have this magical capability, or how those other women figured out how to turn animals into people, or why they have a hive-mind (the magic seems to enforce a hive-mind, but why?), or why they think they can only use bunnies. Still, none of it really matters to the atmosphere. There’s no world-building here. There’s just the emotional base of Samantha’s psychology, and the hilarious satire of the MFA program. (At one point, one of the characters accuses her friend of having a tendency toward orientalism when trying to design her perfect guy. Ma’am, you and your friend are creating unholy semi-human amalgamations that you then murder with axes. Real “How did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” vibes.)
Final thoughts
It’s funny—I can see myself hating the dream-logic aspects of this book and I wouldn’t be surprised by anyone else hating them. Generally, I want stories to make sense, and other dream-logic books like Kafka by the Sea and One Hundred Years of Solitude have mostly just thrown me for a loop. (Although I definitely didn’t hate them—and One Hundred Years has maybe my favorite opening line of any book ever.) It’s hard to say for sure what the difference is between those books and this one, but if I had to isolate something, I’d recall that while reading Kafka by the Sea, I became increasingly irritated by Not Getting It. I understood what was happening mostly, but there was a ton of different symbolism thrown together and details that seemed jarring just for the sake of their own shock value. The themes and story didn’t seem like they had to involve magical realism or dream logic. So by that comparison, the best I can explain my appreciation for Bunny is: it had to be that way. All the under-explained elements have to be there to convey the theme, and any extra explanation would’ve made the book too clunky and destroyed the atmosphere. It might sound like a backhanded compliment, but I think it’s maybe one of the best ones I can pay to any book. This book wasn’t my favorite genre and didn’t address the themes that most resonate with me, but it does something more important in terms of the craft of writing—the elements all fit together; the book is complete.