A Lazy Reader's Review of "Bunny" by Mona Awad
Synopsis
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 the 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 blue. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
Review
Oh god, where to begin. Words cannot begin to express how much I loathed this reading experience. But, I will try my best.
I'll start with talking about the plot. I normally don't read horror/thriller books. They're just not my thing. But my god I wish my introduction into this genre went a little bit better than it did with this book. To begin with, I thought the concept of an all-girls cult was intriguing. I was recommended this book by a bookstore clerk when she saw me wanting to buy The Secret History by Donna Tartt. She had told me that Bunny was of a similar nature, but that she had enjoyed it a lot better. Intrigued by this, I decided to purchase the book (I realize now that that store clerk was an absolute opp). I cannot believe how boring this story was. I was about half way through the book when I asked myself, where is this story going? And not in a good way. Not in a way that a book that was throwing me for absolute loops would make me ask, in the way that a twelve year old's One Direction fanfiction would make me feel. Utter garbage that is surrounded by the aesthetic that is "dark academia" is what this book elicits. And when the pace started to pick up, my god, how predictable it all turned out to be.
Now to the writing. I think that Awad is a decent writer at best, and an absolute bore at worst. There were so many instances in the book where there were be large paragraphs dedicated to describing the most drab and dreary things. I felt like I was being punished every time I read a new sentence. There were also times, when I would encounter these awfully long and boring paragraphs, that I would skip them completely and when I went back to read them I would find out that I missed absolutely nothing. Nothing. This book is 305 pages. This is light work. And it took me nearly two weeks to finish it. Bunny is filled with nothing but paragraphs that insist upon themselves as something more than what it actually is, absolute pretentious nonsense. There is a quote that I think perfectly surmises my feelings about this book:
"Whenever I read one of Victoria's vignettes, I always feel so dumb because I can hardly understand them at all and then I blame myself. I think 'Kira this must be just too brilliant for you to grasp. Surely you must have missed something.' Even though there's always been this small voice inside of me that says 'Um, what the fuck is this please? This makes no sense."
Truer words have never been spoken. It's not that I didn't understand that this book was trying to make fun of pretentious academics. Believe me, I get it. It's the fact that in its pursuit of doing so, it comes across as the exact same thing it tries to make fun of. And it's awful and annoying.
The characters, oh lord the characters. Samantha. What a waste of a main character. She had absolutely no personality whatsoever. From the beginning of the book, you get the sense that the so-called "hatred" she has for the Bunnies is something that is heavily influenced by her best-friend, Ava. And this is something that persists even when she begins to spend time with the Bunnies. Absolutely no backbone can be found in the body of Samantha because she allows the other characters to impose themselves upon her. And, my god, is it annoying. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why she wanted to hang out with these girls. At no point in the book does she ever think "Hm, maybe these girls aren't so bad." She spends one chapter hating on them, and the next making excuses as to why she want to attend their Smut Salon. What a bore. What a disappointment. That pretty much surmises my thoughts on this book: utter disappointment and waste of potential.
Now, some may say "Jasmine, you just didn't understand the book." And I'm begging you to listen to me when I say I fucking understand this book! And guess what? It's still not good. I understand why the dialogue is so very cringe at some points, it's to make fun of the language academics use when discussing their areas of expertise. Still annoying. I understand that the cult is supposed to represent academia itself. Still annoying. I understand that Samantha is supposed to represent every single lay person that finds themselves enamored with the idea of academia and are drawn to its aesthetic. Still. Fucking. Annoying.
It is so bad, I want to give it a zero. But that's not possible, so I give it a one. In retrospect, I should have dnf'ed this book because it was not worth it, at all.
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