As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material.” (She privately mocks the motif of “soup punk nihilism” that crops up in one of the Bunnies’ stories.) After listening to a superficially glowing critique of a Bunny’s story in a workshop, Samantha notes, “t Warren, the ‘body’ is all the rage. The theme – going beyond “the Body” – annoys Samantha, who feels the approach is opaque and pretentious.

At the start of the semester, the Bunnies invite Samantha to a salon of their own. “Bunny” is a term of endearment among the members of the group the Bunnies have real names and distinctive personalities, but as the novel progresses, their cohesive status as a group overrides their individual identities.Įventually, Samantha gets sucked into being a Bunny, almost despite herself. Samantha’s relationship with the Bunnies is complicated: she despises them but also privately envies their wealth, beauty, and all-knowing closeness.

Samantha’s cohort comprises a group of four young women known as the Bunnies, a quartet that resembles what the eponymous high-school girls in Heathers or the Plastics from Mean Girls might have turned into if they took a few women’s studies courses and were unleashed on an MFA program. As a narrator, Samantha is caustic and deeply funny while simultaneously voicing an unshakable emotional heaviness. Samantha was born in a tourist town reminiscent of Niagara Falls her relationship with her parents is melancholic and full of yearning. The author’s second novel follows Samantha, a sophomore MFA student in an experimental creative-writing program at a prestigious uni versity called Warren. In this exploration of how women’s repressed rage and desires can manifest, Awad weaponizes cuteness in a ferocious and dynamic way. Mona Awad’s Bunny is gripping, frenetically readable, and bewilderingly erotic.

Bunny mona awad