Welcome back to Arroz con Mango! If this is your first time here, thanks for checking out my newsletter! This week, I’ll be reviewing Bunny by Mona Awad. I’ve seen it described as a horror novel, as dark academia, as a take on the Heathers/Mean Girls type story, but for me this book is not focused enough to fit any of those genres. Like the creatures that appear at the ‘smut salon,’ this book is a weird hybrid that left me wanting more.
I want to preface my review of Bunny by saying I normally enjoy absurd, ambiguous, surreal stories, but Bunny fell short, especially towards part 3 of the book, where a lack of world building made the narrative repetitive but also confusing.
Our protagonist is Samantha Mackey, an aspiring writer who is working towards a fiction MFA at Warren University, a fictional liberal arts college in New England. She feels like an outcast in her five person program because the other four girls are bffs and all come from money. As a group they are “the bunnies,” (their pet name for each other) but Sam has also given them nicknames like cupcake and duchess based on their appearances. The plot picks up when the bunnies invite Sam to their literary workshop, “the smut salon,” and Sam’s world and sense of reality is turned upside down as she’s sucked into what ostensibly is a cult.
I had many issues with the plot, the themes, and the writing itself. For one, yes, the bunnies sound like they suck and are suuuper pretentious (much more believable for a first year undergrad as opposed to graduate students at the most ‘experimental’ writing program), but besides Sam’s aesthetic and more humble background, we have no reason to believe she’s any less vapid or pretentious either. She’s the quintessential “not like other girls,” but the book doesn’t really offer any critique about that except for maybe the fact that her “hybrids” are also pretentious contrarians.
***spoiler warning***
There are many big reveals in this novel, some more interesting or believable than others. The first is that the smut salon is a quasi witchcraft workshop where real bunnies are “exploded,” conjuring creatures that resemble the men of the bunnies’ fantasies (referred to as hybrids). This was the first let down, because besides demonstrating that the bunnies aren’t really more than uninspired, men-obsessed bad artists, I didn’t get what the point was. Do they think this is improving their writing? Do they actually believe this is a valuable art project? Why do none of them even address the impossibility of this act? These questions become less clear as time goes on. I would have preferred the hybrids to remain more ambiguous, perhaps confining them to the bunnies’ layer would have suggested they might not be real at all (as some readers suspect) or that they are truly a product of a magic, evil group of girls.
Instead, one hybrid infects the “real world.” Max, Sam’s hybrid that manages to swoon not only all of the bunnies, but also Sam’s only friend Ava, a mysterious goth girl who lives in “the bad part of town” and wears a veil and mesh gloves (I only point that out because it is repeated so. many. times). On one hand, the fact that Max can function as a real person unlike the bunnies’ projects which are described as deformed and explode when you ask them questions, might suggest Sam is more imaginative and talented after all. On the other hand, taking cheesy lines out of her notebook and professing his love of Proust, he’s just as much a creation of Sam’s girly desires as the bunnies’ men. I had my doubts about Sam’s perspective, but it was around here where I decided I couldn’t trust her judgement on people or taste of literature.
Where is all started to fall apart for me though, was when Max moves in and begins to date Ava. Here the real and make believe clash, but not enough time is dedicated to fleshing out the details. For example, is Sam troubled by Max’s intentions because he’s her creation or is she jealous that he likes Sam not her? OR is she jealous because she likes Ava? (I got major crush vibes, but nothing every happened between them). Then a series of events derail the story even more. Max decides to pay each bunny a visit, somehow inspiring them all into writing about him. He sets up a meeting with their Warren workshop professor (how did he hack 6 different emails) and they tear each other apart in the reading. This felt like such an anti-climactic demise of the bunnies- we already knew they can’t write. After that, some hybrid version of her thesis advisor (another seemingly unresolved character) and her professor kidnap her and threaten to kill her, but then she inexplicably wake ups unscathed in her classroom.
The worst reveal, in my opinion, is that Max has killed Ava, who is actually a hybrid of a swan. Samantha walks into Ava’s house and sees a swan with an ax through its neck, another inconsistency with the hybrid plot line. With the bunnies, the rabbits have to die for the hybrids to be created, but for Sam, the hybrids seem to live as long as the animal is alive. Additionally, how did Sam create a hybrid pre-going to the smut salon? I’ve left out that the town is described as having creepy, mysterious vibes, but we are left to wonder if this is due to Sam’s vivid imagination or if it’s supposed to contribute to the idea that something supernatural is really going on.
All of this could be overlooked if the prose on its own was enough to drive the book forward. Beautiful language and imagery can often suspend a reader’s imagination, but the writing was too matter of fact, too diary or internal monologue-like for this to happen. Samantha’s Debbie downer attitude gets tiring so fast, and she doesn’t experience any growth throughout the 305 pages. In the end she walks off with Jonah, a fellow student at Warren and the only likable character in my opinion, after she’s treated him like dirt for a whole year. For a book that seems to be poking at the prevalence of surface-level feminism in MFA programs, the ending implying romance felt like the last disappointment in a series of frustrations I had with this book. It could just be hinting at the possibility of her first real friendship, but again it seems hard to believe he’d want to talk to her after how she’s behaved if he wasn’t blinded by love.
I’d be so curious to hear other theories and interpretations of this book and the characters. I really enjoyed Mique’s Book Vlogs’ review; it helped me organize my own thoughts and provided very balanced criticism and praise. He reads it all as Sam’s warped sense of reality informed by childhood trauma hinted at throughout the novel. Some think she’s schizophrenic, hinted at by a woman she sees reading about the condition on a bus. Others suggest it’s all a metaphor for the process of writing. I’d like to have a less bleak outlook on the state of our MFA programs and future authors, but I guess Awad thinks otherwise.