Hilarious satire of a college writing workshop, mean girls, youth, sex, exceptional writing. I kept reading quotes aloud. Perhaps the wending was a bit too meta for me, but I completely enjoyed the ride. and the writing:

Bunny, I love you.
I love you, Bunny.
And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women -- my academic peers--cooingly strangle each other hello. Or good bye. Or just because you're so amazing, Bunny. How fiercely they gripped each other's pink-and-white bodies, forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my breath away. And then the nuzzling of ski-jump noses, peach fuzzy cheeks. Temples pressed against temples in a way that made me think of the labial rubbing of the bonobo or the telepathy of beautiful murderous children in horror films.

Their teacher:
Ursula, whom they have christened KareKare, because she cares so, so much. I call her Fosco, after the villain in the Gothic novel The Woman in White. I don't know why I suppose there is just something about her gravitas, her voice like a thick mist, her long, ever gesturing white hands and her saccadic violet eyes that suggests she has distressed maidens in her basement, human livers in her fridge, that she baby talks to pet mice, attends the opera in a box seat, clapping lightly from the shadows. My god, yes, Ava said when she saw her. My god.

"Perhaps then we could draw from film, winkingly indulge in some campy nostalgia," offers Bunny.
This means Bunny wants James Dean again, leaning against a wooden post again. John Cusack in Say Anything again, holding up his boom box in the rain again. Marlon Brando again, screaming for Stella in the steamy night again. And Bunny at the French-doored balcony again in a white strapless dress patterned with one-eyed birds again. Sweat beads blooming on her upper lip with every roar of her name. Again.

She didn't have to have you over for canapes and catered Indian. I smile at her and her husband, Silky, who has just joined us. He is a lanky man with Eraserhead hair who has garnered a million grants and residencies in crumbling castles and villas all over Europe, to write cryptic little poems in a language he calls Tree.


( )

Every now and then I decide to give a try to different genres. Sometimes I stumble into happy surprises, more often I retreat into my comfort zone soon thereafter. This one deserves the creation of a third category, the one in which I run away screaming with my hair on fire.

It's not the style. The style has its flaws, but I read way worse, and there is a snarky sarcasm in it that actually kept me going.

It's not the WTF quality of the plot. First, I like WTF plots if they are well concocted. Second, if Margaret friggin' Atwood can get away with plot twists that turn dark, intense, believable premises into Helzapoppin', why should we condemn Mona Awad, who at least kept the tone steady throughout the novel? Third, between my favourite books there are the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the whole unabridged Terry Pratchett, I loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I am an ordained Dudeist priest, so this plot here barely qualifies as medium-mild, by WTF ness standards.

It's the whole premise and the characters. Unbelievable, irksome, puerile. Adult women, some of whom with a less-than-upperclass background and therefore an early experience of the real problems of adult life, don't act like that, and if they do, I don't want to read a novel about them. This is the cliché of the American High School Girl Clique Nightmare. I found it boring and unrelatable at sixteen, applied to real teenagers; guess at forty four, applied to adult people.
Nobody acts like that, not even in a horror story. It's horror, not a manual on arrested development.

A final note: the Bunny clique's girls are quite implausible and they look like horrible people since line one, but I would have closed an eye or both, if the very protagonist, her best friend, and pretty much all the characters were not unlikable nearly to the point of creepiness. Bunch of whining, self-absorbed, ever-pouting first world brats.

EDIT: the unusual (for me) genre I wrote about is not horror. It's ya, girly clique whatever whatever. ( )

I love that it's so immediately creepy.
I love that I knew it was Brown before anything identified it. I guess nothing actually identifies it. But I know it's Brown, from one brief campus tour when I was 15.
I love that it's the classic writer in grad school thing that everyone writes and I'm increasingly tired of, but not this time.
I love that I didn't know which direction we were turning every time we turned.
Do I identify with it? Mostly no, if I were in this story I'd be the janitor, but I enjoyed all the edges of it all the same. ( )

it's hard to find words for this book because really and truly it just blew my mind. i think i would recommend going into it completely blind - i was told i'd like it because i had also been through the academic pressure cooker, which i did, but that's kind of not the main point. it's about stories, narrative itself. it's a book you'll love if you love taking apart a work of fiction to see its bones. it's also a book you'll love if you've ever had a fucked up toxic friendship with another girl and/or group of girls. whew! ( )

4.5 stars actually!!!! This book read like a demon that the author had to exorcise from herself. ( )