Mona Awad’s Bunny was first published in 2019 and in the years since has become a BookTok darling, but it is a divisive novel. You are either going to love this book or think it is one of the most unhinged things you have ever read. I’m in the latter camp. I don’t hate it, but I am wondering what the fuck did I just read?

Bunny is about a mid-20s scholarship student named Samantha Heather Mackey who attends a pretentious New England university. She is part of a small graduate fiction writing cohort and hates the other students, a clique of rich girls who love group hugs and call each other “Bunny”. Samantha is a loner with a dark imagination whose writing is not understood by the Bunnies, so it is a shock to her when she receives an invitation to one of their “Smut Salons” and they eventually include her in their Workshops. What happens at their Workshops I am not going to go into here because it would be a huge spoiler, but I still don’t know if it is magic, witchcraft or just a manifestation of imagination. All I know is that it is fucking weird and creepy.

As Samantha is drawn deeper into the Bunnies’ world, it feels like falling down a rabbit hole into some cracked out version of Wonderland. Is it a dream? A hallucination? Or is Samantha having a manic episode? Or is this whole thing a story that she has written? These were the thoughts running through my head as I read one bizarre page after another.

Bunny is a critique of elite literary circles when it becomes apparent that Samantha is a better writer than the Bunnies and that all the money in the world cannot buy the Bunnies imagination and literary intelligence. But I do not really like Samantha, and it wasn’t until late in the novel that I understood why when another character calls her “passive”. Samantha goes through most of the book letting things happen to her and she cares too much about what other people think about her to be reactive. When she is with the Bunnies, she wants them to like her, so she goes along with everything they say, and when she is with her best friend, Ava, who she ends up ditching for the Bunnies, she wants to impress Ava by pretending she doesn’t care about anything or anyone when in truth she cares about Ava more than anything else.

For me, the Bunnies are the more interesting characters, but because the novel is told from Samantha’s perspective, their pasts are a mystery as is how their Workshops came about. However, Awad recently published a sequel to Bunny called We Love You, Bunny which is the events in Bunny told from the Bunnies perspective, so now I am going to have to read it.