Bunny: A Novel

Ok….so…hear me out. I can’t tell if the main character is insane, the author, or me. This book is filled with a million metaphors and so much symbolism that I did get lost a lot and had to read things again. What I gathered is the “bunnies” are a sorority, they’re basically a cult. And Samantha is 100% an unreliable narrator. I think she’s schizophrenic. But I was thoroughly entertained. It was a weird book, I’m not sure what genre this is considered because it was kind of dark, it was also funny and creepy at times. I never knew what to believe. But Mona is a great writer and I read this one because All’s Wells was a fun read last year for me. I liked that one more but this one was interesting in its own twisted way

This book was the three-est of three stars for me. I didn’t hate all of it. I didn’t love much of it. I don’t think I really even liked most of it, but the parts I liked, I liked just enough to not hate it? Maybe? I don’t know. I’m glad I finally read it. I’m equally glad it’s over, but I do want to read the sequel (We Love You, Bunny coming in September 2025) because it has Bunny backstories, and they seem infinitely more interesting than sad-sack Samantha who was annoying AF.

I do not think Bunny works best as a broad statement about women, female friendship, or even toxic clique behavior. That feels too easy, and honestly, too shallow for what the book is actually doing. To me, Bunny is less about “what happened” and more about Samantha’s psyche trying to survive loneliness, envy, grief, desire, creative pressure, and the terror of wanting to belong to something she also despises. The Bunnies are not just a group of women. They are Samantha’s nightmare version of belonging. They have intimacy, private language, aesthetic unity, creative power, and the feeling of being chosen. But the cost of entering that world appears to be individuality. They are seductive because they represent everything Samantha thinks she hates but secretly wants access to: closeness, certainty, beauty, status, and a shared creative ritual. That is what makes Samantha interesting. Her contempt does not feel pure. It feels defensive. If she can make the Bunnies ridiculous enough, artificial enough, grotesque enough, then maybe she does not have to admit that some part of her wants to be invited in. Ava is the piece I kept coming back to. I am not convinced Ava is real in the ordinary sense. I do not mean that as a simple “imaginary friend” reading. I think Ava may be Samantha’s interface with the world: the sharper, cooler, darker, more socially fearless version of herself who can do things Samantha cannot quite do directly. Ava can enter conversations, be desired, be dangerous, be gothic, be dismissive, and serve as Samantha’s anchor against the Bunnies. But Ava is also a coping mechanism. She is home, resistance, self-doubt, self-protection, and maybe Samantha’s last private self before the group begins absorbing her. In that sense, I think the better question is not simply, “Was Ava real?” The better question is: what does Ava allow Samantha to do, feel, remember, or avoid? That is where the book becomes more interesting to me. I read Bunny as a novel about destructive coping mechanisms. Samantha does not process loneliness directly. She turns it into people, rituals, fantasies, monsters, social worlds, and eventually bodies. The Bunnies become one coping structure. Ava becomes another. The created boys become another. The boys felt less like people to me and more like drafts of desire. They are fantasies made physical. But once they become too flawed, too independent, too disappointing, or too real, they become disposable. That made the book feel like it was saying something nasty and interesting about art, desire, and control. How much of creation is love, and how much of it is trying to make something obey the fantasy that produced it? The workshop setting supports that perfectly. Creative writing already asks people to turn private inner life into something other people can judge. Bunny just makes that process grotesque, bodily, humiliating, and violent. Creation in this book is not clean. It is messy, embarrassing, needy, magical, and cruel. I also think the book turns ordinary social dread into literal horror. From the outside, Samantha is adjacent to a clique in an MFA program. But internally, that clique becomes mythic. They become cult, monster, temptation, fantasy, threat, and home. The book is not just about the Bunnies themselves. It is about what the mind does to a room before the body enters it. The prose was complicated for me. Sometimes I thought the style was brilliant because it felt like Samantha’s mind was infecting the language of the book. The excess, the absurdity, the strange vocabulary, the sweetness turned rotten — all of that felt intentional and effective. Other times, I felt the author’s hand a little too strongly. Some of the language felt elevated for the sake of elevation rather than precision. But even that may be part of the character’s voice and the satire of MFA culture, so I am not entirely sure whether that irritation belongs to the author or to Samantha. That uncertainty is part of what makes the book work. Bunny does not give clean ground. It keeps the reader inside Samantha’s instability, where magic, dissociation, fantasy, satire, grief, and horror all overlap. My main read is this: Bunny is about the terror of being outside the room and the equal terror of being invited in. Samantha is lonely, but the available form of belonging is monstrous. She wants intimacy, but intimacy threatens to erase her. She wants creative power, but creation becomes violence. She wants to despise the Bunnies, but some part of her recognizes herself in them. So maybe the real question is not “was this magic or madness?” Maybe the better question is: What parts of herself does Samantha have to invent in order to survive being alone?

So confusing, definitely not something I would have picked up on my own.

Very weird and intriguing. I was questioning everything constantly. I loved it and can't wait to start the next book.