Mona Awad

This one really hit the spot for me. I firmly believe that often the bizarre and symbolic are the best ways to explain complex emotional experiences, especially relationships. The intensity is imparted through these weird, over-the-top scenes and situations that, when done well, feel more emotionally honest and resonant to me than words alone would be (part of why A Little Life didn't work for me...too many overly emotional words drain the actual emotion from the scene). Awad does this show more symbolic representation of complex emotions and relationships exceptionally well. The mother-child relationship feels devastatingly true, but she also does a great job showing the ways in which friendships and romantic relationships get confused for us, too. And of course the commentary about how our tendency to try to fill our emotional needs through external means can leave us easy prey for the beauty industry and any number of cultish entities (MLMs, modern political parties, self-help schemes, Internet "gurus", fad diets).

And I love that it's set in San Diego! show less

Bunny follows Samantha in her final semesters at Warren University’s Creative Writing programme, as she becomes entangled with the unsettlingly twee yet sinister “Bunny” clique and slowly drifts from her best friend into their bizarre, horrifying workshops. The narrative leans heavily into surreal, stream-of-consciousness storytelling, blurring dream, delusion, and possibly magical reality to the point where even by the end - listening on audio - I genuinely wasn’t sure which was show more which.

There’s plenty here that will appeal to readers who enjoy drifting in disorienting prose and embracing ambiguity. It gleefully skewers MFA tropes and the preciousness of certain creative-writing circles, which I did appreciate (and, doing an equivalent degree myself, I can see why my sister recommended it). I just hadn’t realised quite how gory, surreal, and plot-light it would be, and that combination ultimately didn’t hold my attention.

While I respect what Awad was doing - and it will absolutely resonate deeply with the right reader - this one felt a little too opaque and self-indulgent (however intentionally so) for me. I suspect it’s best approached with full awareness of the ride you’re in for. show less

Samantha Heather Mackey is a scholarship student in the fiction MFA program at the elite Warren University in New England. She's an outsider with a dark imagination and exactly one friend — Ava, a sharp-tongued art school dropout who would rather die than associate with the other women in Samantha's cohort. Those women are the Bunnies: a tight-knit clique of four rich girls — Cupcake, Vignette, the Duchess, and Creepy Doll — who call each other "Bunny," crush each other in rib-cracking show more hugs, write aggressively experimental fiction about The Body, and make Samantha's skin crawl.
When the Bunnies send Samantha a mysterious invitation to their off-campus "Smut Salon," she goes — and things get very strange very quickly. The Bunnies are conducting rituals in which they gather around rabbits from the campus grounds, the rabbits explode, and handsome young men materialize in their place. These "Drafts" or "Darlings" are their creative project — imperfect hybrid creations that they compare to their writing, and dispatch with an axe when they don't work out. Samantha gets drawn deeper in, begins to lose herself in the collective Bunny hive mind, and creates her own Draft named Max — only to discover Max has gone rogue and found his way to Ava. The novel is a savage satire of MFA culture, creative writing academia, and the specific horror of privileged art-speak dressed up as profound.
[May contain spoilers]
The deeper layer of the novel is about Samantha's unreliable narration and the question of what is actually real versus what her isolation, loneliness and imagination have constructed. Ava's existence becomes increasingly ambiguous — she may be a projection of Samantha's own psyche rather than a real person. The ending is deliberately, beautifully unresolved — Samantha appears to invite Jonah (the poetry student) into her world, but the last lines suggest he might be imaginary too. The novel is really about the creative act itself, loneliness, and the terror of losing yourself to a group identity. The MFA satire is vicious and very funny.
What I think: This is a love-it-or-hate-it book and the reviews reflect that split perfectly. If you're in the camp that finds the MFA world insufferable enough to find its satirizing deeply satisfying, and you can tolerate deliberately unresolved surrealism, it's genuinely brilliant. If you need plot momentum and clear reality you'll find it deeply frustrating. The prose is extraordinary. show less

This is the most meta book I've read in a very long time. References to other transgressive works abound. The setting is an annoying MFA program at a small, elite private college in New England. How very Shirley Jackson. There are clusters of people who think of themselves as special because of their wealth, talent and privilege. They mentally torture other students on the regular. Of course they do. Some of them are insane. How very BEE. There are plenty of pop-culture references inverted show more and ravaged. Awad tramples modernity with a smirk worthy of a thousand Heathers. Of course the Bunnies live in the town of Warren.

We are left with Girl, Interrupted who lives in the Lair of Cthulhu. There's an awful lot of crazy here. Real and hallucination meld. Samantha's best friend is the strong and beautiful swan that she wants to be. Literally.

I probably should have taken notes on all the sly references and symbols, but I'm so lazy when I read a book that's so much fun. I just want to move with the flow of the book. I'm definitely going to check out Awad's other books. I loved Bunny. show less