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Friday, July 14, 2023

Review: BUNNY by Mona Awad

 

BunnyBunny by Mona Awad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one

"We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?"

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, a caustic art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunny cult and starts to take part in their ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they magically conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision.

A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and friendship and desire, Bunny is a dazzlingly original second book.

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Oh, wow. This book. THIS BOOK!

Joining a cult while studying your MFA in creative writing? A cult where you summon monsters? This was the perfect book for me to read while finishing my MFA in creative writing.

The writing is just so trippy, so psychedelic, and it's the exact kind of horror I love. And I don't even want to say any more than that, because I think going into this book with no idea or expectations about it meant I had the best reading experience possible.

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