This wasn’t at all what I was expecting (a straightforward campus novel set in a creative writing department), and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At the beginning I was a little irritated by how unrealistic some of the characters were, but once the more speculative elements of the novel were realised that irritation wore off and I could enjoy the experimentalism. I was slightly confused towards the end, unsure of just how everything tied up, but perhaps that was intentional.

Bunny is a novel about an outsider who ends up involved with a college clique, but it doesn't go down how you'd expect. Samantha is an MFA student at a prestigious college, resentful of the rich girls who all each other 'Bunny' that she has to share workshops with. Her only friend is Ava, a weirdo from the local art college, who hates Samantha's college and the people there. Out of the blue, the 'Bunnies' invite Samantha to their mysterious 'Smut Salon', and it seems like she is being let into the fold. However, things start to get sinister and surreal as Samantha is drawn deeper into their world.

From the summary, the book sounds like another college clique campus story, but it really isn't. Samantha may seem like a classic heroine of such a novel—lonely, brooding, poor, unable to write despite it being how she will graduate—but the narrative is not. Instead, it takes a kind of twisted unreality and uses it to satirise writing (particularly the kinds of writing that the Bunnies are shown to do, variously pretentious and trying to be profound and dark) and to question what is happening to the characters. At first the style can be a bit irritating, but it settles down and feels purposeful (particularly the endless repeating of 'Bunny').

Bunny is a novel that some will find too bizarre, some will question what it really means, and others will enjoy the ride. There are some similarities with Heathers, but also with a blend of literary and teen horror; it is a book that defies reality, but also pokes fun at writing and trying to do what the novel itself is doing.

A writer’s block, loneliness and depression, blurred lines between what is real and what is a product of an overactive imagination. Mona Awad’s outsider heroine, Samantha Heather Mackey suffers from all of the above in Bunny, a horror/satire novel.

Samantha is a 25 year old postgraduate creative writing student at a prestigious university, surrounded by people who all seem to know what they’re doing and where they’re going. In particular, four young women from her workshop, Bunnies, always perfectly dressed, perfectly expressed and so perfectly in tune with each other that they act and behave as a hivemind, repulsing and attracting Samantha in equal measure. As she struggles to get over her writing block and complete the course, she is adopted by the Bunnies and all sorts of things start to happen.

I have to admit feeling somewhat ambivalent about Bunny. Parts of it I liked a lot – Bunnies, all the literary bits, some of it was very well done and funny. Sentences like “Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust” and “Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.” But then I also thought the novel dragged a bit, the writing was getting a bit repetitive and overdone. At times, both Samantha and the Bunnies felt much younger than women in their mid twenties. I guess with the praise the novel has received, especially in being compared to The Vegetarian, which I loved, I was expecting a bit more.

My thanks to Head of Zeus and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review Bunny.

A creepy strange novel that is set on a university campus with an outsider being inducted into a popular clique.