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Bunny: A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Soon to be a major motion picture

"Jon Swift + Witches of Eastwick + Kelly 'Get In Trouble' Link + Mean Girls + Creative Writing Degree Hell! No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled! O Bunny you are sooo genius!" --Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

"A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." --Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times

"Awad is a stone-cold genius." --Ann Bauer, The Washington Post

The Vegetarian
meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Rouge

"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 seem to move and speak as 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, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library

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336 pages

Average rating: 6.45

597 RATINGS

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32 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

Anonymous
Jan 08, 2025
4/10 stars
Not a fan. Hoping Rouge is better than Bunny.
Anonymous
Jan 07, 2025
6/10 stars
How do you rate a book you kind of hated reading but has brilliant online interpretations with interesting social commentary on mental illness, art institutions, horror as a genre, and transmogrification? I guess three stars?
not_another_ana
Dec 29, 2024
2/10 stars
1/5 stars

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don't know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story


Generally when I manage to read a book until the very end, even if I didn't like it, I give it 2 stars as a sort of reward for at least keeping me there. In this case I cannot give it that little bit of grace. This wasn't good.

This book follows a scholarship student named Samantha who is studying in this very prestigious university. She's suffering from writer's block as well as personal issues but it all changes when she gets closer to a group of friends, known as the Bunnies, and participates in their famouse "Smut Salon" meetings. The summary calls this a "down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination." and sure it had all that but it didn't mesh particularly well, it was quite a hodgepodge of things.

My main issues with this however is the protagonist. She didn't have to be likeable, but she had to be something. The Samantha from the beginning and the Samantha from the last page are the same just that the latter is now even more self righteous. Not only that but next to her the Bunnies were far more vivid and interesting, I wanted to know about them without Samantha's judginess getting in the way. And that's another thing, I couldn't stand her "not like other girls" attitude. During the first third of the book (which is the best bit of this whole thing) I thought this was going on a different direction, a more nuanced take where Samantha's beliefs would get flipped when it turned out that the Bunnies had personalities and likes and something else beside being caricatures of hyper feminine rich women. But no! At the end she was right to dislike them and they were catty and boy crazy, give me a fucking break.

Then there's the plot itself. I love magical realism and I'm fine with unreliable narrators up to a point, but this was too messy. And since it was from the point of view of someone who things just happened to and was pretty meh I felt very uninterested in this. I do think that the first third is really solid. The imagery is interesting, the writing is solid, and the main idea of the Bunnies and their rituals is different and intriguing. And then it completely lost me. I also did not care for Ava and I thought the author could have pushed this into a more compelling narrative by exploring their relationship from a more romantic point of view.
mhalgren
Dec 17, 2024
8/10 stars
lots of Easter eggs — had to use my brain to decipher the motifs / metaphors but overall it was an easy read just so so much to ponder i need people to chat about this with

4 stars bc i think the Like murderous mean girl trope is a little overdone and it was self aware with the Heathers references and obvious Regina George inspiration

Thought the other aspects were very creative and the plot twist made my jaw drop and there’s a bit of a cliffhanger

gigireadshorror
Nov 26, 2024
8/10 stars
Idk

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