Review of Bunny (Bunny #1) by Mona Awad

Bunny begins with an outcast main protagonist in a MFA program who's infuriated by her twee fellow seminar students. It builds into an increasingly unhinged, intriguing phantasmagoria, equal parts dark nightmare and outrageously silly absurdity.

I was intrigued by the sound ofWe Love You, Bunny, the sequel to Mona Awad's novel Bunny, so I went back to first read this book.

Samantha is a scholarship MFA student at the progressive Warren University in New England. An outsider, a solitary type immersed in her own sometimes dark writing, she is disgusted by the rest of her cohort--childish women who call each other "Bunny," dress in twee outfits, speak in high voices, and, aside from their hilariously outrageous creations (one writes what she calls proems, “etched on panes of glass using a dagger-shaped diamond she wears around her neck; another presents "a series of unpunctuated vignettes about a woman named Z who pukes up soup while thinking nihilistic thoughts, then has anal sex in a trailer"), seem to be of one unimaginative mind and to operate in a mindless echo chamber of nonsense.

But when the Bunnies invite Samantha to their "Smut Salon," and into their hive mind of dottiness. She becomes oddly entrenched in their circle, then increasingly unsure of herself and vulnerable. She ditches her few true friends, also outsiders, and feels at a loss to determine the line between reality and richly imagined dark, seemingly impossible developments.

The Bunnies are vapid, petty, entitled, and aggressively manipulative. They feel shocking in their existence, partially because they managed to secure spots in a graduate writing program yet seemingly have almost nothing to say. When they draw Samantha into their circle, they are maddeningly underhanded and scheming as they work her over and force her into a cultlike assimilation--and Samantha is infuriating in her simpering, inexplicable, growing desire for their approval. But they are surprisingly powerful; their true "work" ("the work" is referenced ad nauseam in the seminar the Bunnies and Samantha share) is ambitious, outrageous, horrifying, and powerful, taking on a life of its own.

Bunny feels like an excoriation of MFA programs and wealthy attendees; a harsh take on conformity; and a dark take on the consequences of wanting too much.

But just as the novel felt as though it were lasting too long for me and began to teeter toward the tedious; just as I wondered if I could stand to listen to the Bunnies' perfectly horrible, put-on baby voices for another couple of hours (narrator Sophie Amoss deftly handles the voices in this novel to great effect), the story went in a truly unhinged direction that intrigued me.

My friend Amy described this novel perfectly as a fever dream. Reality, dream, desire, memory, and guilt all become intertwined, and it's difficult for Samantha--and for the reader--to discern what is true, what occurred, what is allegory, what is the stuff of nightmares. A couple of scenes are horrifying, some are darkly hilarious, and Awad clearly delights in the absurd.

It's difficult to describe how bonkers this story is. I was surprised by how hooked I became on it. This is not a book I would universally recommend, but for an audience that appreciates cutting satire and a bananas story, this one will fit the bill.

I listened to Bunny as a library audiobook.

More from this Author and More Oddball Novels

Mona Awad is also the author of Rouge, All's Well, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.

You might also be interested in these Bossy reviews of oddball or offbeat novels.