Book: Bunny by Mona Awad
Read From: 12th June - 16th June 2021
Rating: 3/5 stars
Summary: Samantha Mackey is an outsider in her small University programme, repelled by her writing cohort - a group of twee rich girls who call each other 'Bunny'. When Samantha receives an invitation from the Bunnies, her intrigue takes over and she is inexplicably drawn to their front door, across the threshold and down their rabbit hole.
This book is without a doubt the weirdest thing I have ever read in my life. I am still to this day thinking about it, trying to work out what on earth actually happened... and I don’t know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing!? For that reason, I feel like this review is extremely hard to write - the weirdness is not something you’ll be able to fully appreciate unless you give this book a go for yourself. Regardless, I’m going to try my absolute best to put my jumbled thoughts into a somewhat coherent review...
It’s clear from the outset that Samantha is, and feels like, an ‘outcast’ in her class. Awad immediately transports us into Samantha’s mind where we see her wicked humour and utter resentment towards the Bunnies - dubbed by Samantha as ‘The Duchess’, ‘Creepy Doll’, ‘Cupcake’ and ‘Vignette’. She is an extremely unreliable narrator and we begin seeing this when she falls under the Bunnies' spell - Samantha's life from then on clearly feels like a hallucination to her which is even reflected in the narrative of this book and began to feel like a hallucination to myself as the reader. Honestly, I didn't know which parts were real or which parts even made sense. Closing the novel after the final sentence felt like waking up from a fever dream and I can't get it out of my head!
You were warned that I would struggle writing this book review, I have absolutely no idea what else to talk about! I genuinely think that if Bunny sounds like your cup of tea from the summary, it’s a book that would be better appreciated from first-hand reading. Expect to be confused, expect to be weirded out and expect to make faces at the book because you have absolutely no idea what is going on... because that is essentially this book in a nutshell. I feel like this novel should be a ‘love it or hate it’, but I honestly can’t work out what category I fit in. Please try Bunny out for yourself, I desperately need somebody to discuss it with!