#Spooktober ‘Bunny’ by Mona Awad

About the book..

The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls.

‘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, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunnies, 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 the dazzlingly original second book from the author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

I read my ebook copy of ‘Bunny‘ courtesy of my Kindle Unlimited subscription, it is available also as an audiobook, e=hardback and paperback wherever good books are sold!

Oh . My >god.

This book.

It is brutal and feafless in its skewering of the artistic community, in its portrayal of those who say versus those who do.

Samantha is a student at The Warren, sharing her workshop with girls she calls The Bunnies, well they all call each other Bunny as they exist as this amorphous mass of girliness, sugar sweetness and perfection. Their softness and cloying nature is truly terrifying, you -well I-genuinely feared for Sam every time she was in the room with these girls as she was worn down by their constant talk of The Body as a concept and share their proems written on mirrors using diamonds, or their twisted fairy tales, or their vignettes.

Their tutor laps up and adores their work, with Sam on the outside of this exalted circle, the one around whom rumours swirl of inappropriate behaviour with a male tutor, known as The Lion.

Animal and body imagery rule through these pages which are redolent with decsriptions that cause the Bunnies to leap off the page. They are so distinctly uniform, it’s amazing how Mona Awad manages to make them so similar and yet so damn universally sickening in their desires, their aims to be important, how casually they play with the lives of others.

On the outside of the Warren, is Samantha’s real life with her best friend, Ava, where she lives in poverty that people like the Bunnies could never understand.

Totally unaware that her privilege is marking her out, Samantha is haunted by her loneliness, her lost parents, her inability to write and finally, her inability to be accepted.

So when the Bunnies send a text inviting her to a Smut Salon, where they share their fiction, what kind of direction will Samantha be led into?

Her place on the Master Of Fine Arts programme dangling in the wind, whilst her ability to tell reality from her own writing lingers on a knife edge, what she is about to jump into may cost her her very soul…

I absolutely would not say that I got everything the author was intending with Bunny, I claim nothing more than to be an avid and passionate reader. In this book I felt so emotionally wrought, horrified and exhausted that when I finished it, I could only admire the ability of a writer to wring such emotions and fear, and terror out of me for her protagonist. It may be a horror story, ostensibly labelled as such, however, to me, it is a story of love and faith and determination. It works on so many levels and I look forward to being able to sit down and read it all over again. But first I really need to process it a bit more…

About the author..

Mona Awad was born in Montreal and has lived in the US since 2009. Her debut novel, ’13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl’, published on February 23, 2016 (Penguin Books) won the Amazon Best First Novel award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. It was also longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. Her new novel, ‘Bunny’(Viking) will be released in 2019.

Her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, TIME magazine, Electric Literature, VICE, The Walrus, and elsewhere. She has worked as an instructor in the Literary Arts department at Brown University and as a bookseller for various independent bookstores including Pages in Toronto, The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City and Blackwell Books in Edinburgh. She has also worked as a freelance journalist and a food columnist for the Montreal-based magazine Maisonneuve.

She earned an MFA in fiction from Brown University and an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation was on fear in the fairy tale. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Denver

Links-http://mona-awad-grou.squarespace.com/

Twitter @monaawadauthor