Mona Awad

Bunny is a truly bizarre, creepy, hallucinatory and hilarious novel. It has been so long since I’ve read this kind of mish-mash of magical realism, fantasy and horror that I had forgotten how much I love it! I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, which has inspired me to write up the most detailed analysis of a book I’ve done in twenty years (since my Uni days!).

I have seen many users on here, including those that gave high star ratings, struggling to put into words what they thought, show more and I had some time on my hands between Christmas and New Year so I wanted to put my mind to the task! I have to say that in doing so I developed an even greater love for it, and uncovered new layers of understanding.

You can read the full analysis here.
Otherwise, I've thrown a condensed version below!

Plot
Towards the end of the novel, one of the titular Bunnies has an outburst that I think summarises the experience many readers have had with this book –

I feel like screaming JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS AND WHAT YOU DID WITH HIM EXACTLY.”

One of the challenges with talking about this book is that the plot is so bizarre that it is tricky to summarise effectively, particularly without giving away spoilers!

Characters
Samantha Heather Mackey
Samantha is your fairly 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. With a dead mother and an absent father, Samatha is isolated and lonely.

She keeps a barrier of snark and judgement up between herself and others. Most of the other characters she refers to nearly exclusively by a dehumanising nickname; from each of the four Bunnies (Duchess, Cup Cake, Vignette and Creepy Doll) to her professors (Fosco and the Lion). She accepts the invitation to join the Bunnies at their “Smut Salon” out of a combination of her loneliness and awareness that her isolation is ultimately not healthy for her mentally or academically.

As this whole novel is from Samantha’s point of view we are along for the ride on her mental rollercoaster, told in her own voice. To understand Bunny you need to understand Samantha's state of mind.

The Bunnies
The Bunnies are a quartet of privileged white women who shower each other with compliments, text in emojis and hug each other with such intensity they may crush vital organs. Samantha is as jealous of their privilege (“Their skins glowing with health insurance”) as she is nauseated by their behaviour and derisive of the empty, pretentious work they produce.

I have seen criticisms of this book for the misogyny in the descriptions of the Bunnies, but I read this as entirely intentional and a symptom of Samantha’s dark, often hateful state of mind.

The Bunnies are cartoon characters, but that is the point. Like The Heathers, or The Plastics, they have a uniform – though each one has an individual themed flavour much like the Spice Girls or Bratz dolls – the privileged hippy, the uptight preppy girl, the cutesy alt girl, and the trashy punk. I thought they were fantastic – and I could clearly picture them as characters in a movie.

Themes - this is where we get mildy spoilery
I picked up on:
- The ridiculous pretensions (e.g. a lot of talk about "The Body") and privileged characters you might encounter at an "elite" writing program.
- I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of the Bunny's trying to have an intellectual discussion about "The Body" when clearly their motives are overtly base and sexual ("I'm borny") not the pursuit of high art. This frequently made me laugh out loud.
- The artistic progress, in particular, the need to "kill your darlings" (but...literally?!)
- Loneliness, isolation.. questioning reality (Samantha is a very unreliable narrator!)

Writing Style
I love Mona Awad’s writing – so much I may have gone overboard with the quotations! It’s so darkly funny, and some of her turns of phrase made me laugh out loud.

“She gives me the full hate bouquet of her smile. Every fuck you flower.”

Samantha’s slide deeper into madness is so well captured. I love that in the second part, as she is sucked into the Bunny Cult she uses “we” instead of “I”. The peppering in of all the Bunny phrases through the final third too, as they now have seeped into her consciousness, is fantastic.

Conclusions

I enjoyed this book more than anything I've read in a long, long time. I even read it twice, and then wrote up a whole essay of a review for it! The last time I pulled quotes from a book and thought about themes and meanings was twenty years ago for my English Lit degree!

Thank you Mona Awad for reminding me how much fun there is to be found in analysing a really good book!

This book is deceptively layered and complex, and I think many readers who did not enjoy it perhaps misunderstood it and tried to take it too much at face value. Though even at face value I think it’s a super fun weird, gory little story! show less

All’s Well by Mona Awad

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mona Awad's writing gets me so excited as a reader. I am obsessed with Bunny and I loved All's Well too! I read it twice through, and I wrote
a long blog post with my thoughts and analysis.


You can do and read that if you want (obviously it contains lots of spoilers and quotes etc!), but here I will just stick a Mini Review!

I loved it, obviously.

- A twisty unreliable narrator that goes from sympathetic to the villain in her own story!
- The show more writing is clever, and viscerally describes the experience of chronic pain (clearly from the author's own experiences) and misogyny in a medical establishment run by men. I am obsessed with Mona Awad's writing, its so confident and her voice is so strong. She immediately has me.
- Delicious Shakespearean witchcraft, references and themes as the novel hangs between Macbeth and All’s Well That Ends Well.
- Atmospheric, visual and spooky, it gave me David Lynch (Twin Peaks) vibes.
- It does have an ambiguous ending that not all readers may love, but thematically I think its fitting.

If you did enjoy Bunny, then I think you’ll enjoy this one too! It’s narrative is more straightforward and it doesn’t have the guts and gore!



View all my reviews show less

Lonely creative writing graduate student Samantha completely resents her classmates - a close-knit clique of four perfect rich girls who call each other "bunny". One day the bunnies invite Samantha to one of their mysterious parties - the Smut Salon - and Samantha leaves her co-dependent best friend Ava to fall into the bunnies' weird, disturbing world.

This could have been so good, and I could have loved it. The intersection of the twee and the macabre is where I live, but I do NOT live on show more the cul-de-sac of "this doesn't make sense". A lot of interesting threads are just dropped (the school is in a city so dangerous that no one can go outside at night and there are beheadings on a regular basis, but that's only mentioned once or twice and never directly addressed.) The bunnies seemed like they could be interesting, Stepford-Wife villains, but somehow they're not well drawn enough to be automatons. And in the end, it turns out that almost nothing in this book was real, which could have been compelling if the story was good but since it's not everything just collapses into a puddle of boring.
Nothing in this story feels fully formed (literally or figuratively), and while that might be the point it is deeply unsatisfying to read. It is, in the end, about the stories we tell ourselves when we are very lonely, but I really wanted there to be more here. show less

Samantha is in a master’s writing program in an elite school. She is in the first all-female class in the creative writing workshop. When we meet her, she has already been in the program for a year and is returning after a break. She is the outsider in her cohort which is comprised of four other women who come off as incredibly creepy and saccharine. They are described as very touchy and lovey towards each other, wearing lots of pastels and frilly clothes, delighting in each other, and show more affectionately calling each other bunny. They are disorienting.

Samantha is friendless other than Ava, who does not attend the college but lives in town. They both find “the bunnies” despicable. Samantha and Ava spend most of their time together at Ava’s place. One day, the bunnies invite Samantha to one of their “smut salons,” a private workshop where she discovers their project – turning rabbits into hybrid humans using their collective mental energy. The process of the transformation is quite gory, with rabbits exploding and bad versions of hybrids being killed with an ax.

When it is Samantha’s turn to create a hybrid, it seems like nothing has happened. They think she has failed. But then they see a man outside of their window, and he is the most perfect hybrid yet. Then he gets on a bus and disappears.

As Samantha continues to negotiate her friendship with the bunnies and with Ava, I was increasingly aware of her collapsing mental state. Reality and fantasy continue to blur. Things do not quite add up. It all ends in a frenzy of bunnies who have become enthralled with Samantha’s creation, Max.

Max and Ava have also formed an intimate relationship. One of the bunnies discovers this and seeks revenge. Samantha returns to Ava’s to discover Max covered in blood and a dead swan. Knowing that Ava was also one of her creations, she takes the ax and heads to the bunnies’ headquarters.

Samantha and Max confront the bunnies who have pieces of Ava’s clothes on and have her feathers in their hair. As the bunnies storm Max, Samantha swings the ax into his neck, and he is re-transformed into a stag.

I loved the satire and magical realism. Though the big reveals were weighted at the end, I sensed that Ava was not quite what she seemed. There were times when I had difficulty parsing how the fairy tale aspects tied into the real world, feeling a bit inconclusive overall. Her writing is poetic and inventive. Both fairy tale and horror story, I appreciated the pace and was very entertained. show less