Bunny

Satire of arts Academia meets Heathers. Perspective character is a poor-kid outsider to her glittering rich-girl classmates so you can likely decide for yourself if that mixture of sometimes justified, sometimes self-sabotaging resentment and self-pity is going to grind your gears or not. I enjoyed the hyperbolic descriptions of her classmates, I enjoyed the gory horror twist to their antics. The book is not unpredictable and I didn't find it particularly tense. I enjoyed it well enough.

I don't think this book makes particularly strong statements about Academia, femininity, or whatever else it is supposed to be about. It's more an atmosphere of satire than a satire with a point. I found myself thinking that was pretty fun and hilarious in the beginning quarter, then found myself getting quite bored for the last quarter of the book. For the middle quarters, some of the imagery and weirdness kept me going. I was not particularly invested in the main character, and sadly didn't find her interesting. So although I think she is "important" in many scenes, pages that focus on her alone are often really dull. There is little to like about Samantha and her friend, and they do not like her classmates. So fascination with the classmates is really the only thing I had to enjoy about anyone's actions in the book. Not everything has to have some tremendous point, but there are characters and tensions that feel really half-finished. So, at times it feels brilliantly funny, at other times it is uncomfortable not for its horrors but for weird banal entanglements. This book leaves a lot of things unanswered, but not in a way I think really adds any depth to it.

Speaking of unanswered, there is a lot of interpretation going around about Samantha's mental state and the reality or unreality of the events in the book. I caution against taking a firm stance on this. This is one of the things the book actually does well, though in a fairly simple way. The book is totally coherent at face value, if you assume the events are literal and real. The book is also totally coherent if you assume nearly nothing happening is real. The book doesn't itself bring up the question of unreality, but many readers have. I don't think this is masterful in the way many books specifically about delusion (The Double) are, but I enjoy that the story works either way and doesn't really insist on a twist (Fight Club). I do think assumptions of delusion flatten the book massively, even if a literal interpretation is ridiculous. I think the book is best enjoyed NOT trying to be clever about every little thing Awad writes, because frankly I don't think everything she wrote here was that clever.

Samantha—loner and outsider at prestigious Warren University—finds the rest of her writing cohort beneath her and relentlessly denigrates them with her arty friend, Ava, until an invitation arrives.

I did not care for this at all. I found it predictable, and irritatingly coy about its predictability. The protagonist is the worst mean girl of all the mean girls, and a tedious, self-absorbed one at that. I just found everything about it silly and boring, and wouldn't have read it had I known it was magical realism, which I despise. Absolutely not for me.

A very generous rounding up of the rating. I'm really not sure her writing is for me in general, but as it kept coming up on best horror lists, I wanted to give it a go.
I'd categorise it as fantastic fiction, with slightly morbid undertone. A drop of magic and some impossible things become possible, and the line between real and imaginary gets very faint. Most of the book felt a bit like a cloud, as Samantha lost her identity getting dragged into the bunny gang, but I'm still not sure wtf they were actually doing with the bunnies, and how come they got drawn into the hive mindset, and were not able to break out even when they got split apart. So as it was told by Samantha, it all felt quite confusing, muffled, and oppressive. Didn't quite see the plot twist coming, but I didn't feel there were many characters that felt real enough, or humane enough to give the story depth.

This book is bonkers! I was like, "what did I get myself into?" It's creepy down the Bunny

I barely remember reading this book at this point because it has been over half a year, so apologies for a dull and ranting review. I picked this one up because of the wisps of hype I had observed around the book and the fact that it promised an intriguing spin on the dark academia trope. But Bunny was a chore to get through, and I would have and should have DNFed it… if not for my annoying curiosity as to where these strange events would lead. Let that be a lesson to just DNF a book if your heart isn’t in it, no matter if you walk away without knowing how everything is resolved. (I’m still working on this.)

To start off, every character managed to annoy me, particularly our protagonist, ‘Smackie’ (and dumb nicknames abound in this book, so here is your warning if you cannot abide by that sort of thing). I’m just going to call her Sam. Anyway, Sam is one of the most insufferable protagonists; and I get why—she’s had a rough go in life and has to deal with some horrible elitism at the fancy yet fictional Warren College. I am sure that some of her experiences are somewhat autobiographical. The Bunnies, a clique of twee, fancy rich girls, are of course even worse, given that they are just as annoying and have delusional groupthink layered on top. Now, a book with unlikable characters itself need not be a bad thing; sometimes an author handles it well and makes you connect with or sympathize with the characters despite their natures. It was not so for me here.

This book is lumped with other ‘dark academia’ books, but I would caution against that categorization. There is a superficial veneer of academia, but it doesn’t play as large a role in the novel as I would have assumed. Sure, academia and its criticisms is the stage on which our characters dance, but their involvement with it is largely unexamined aside from the obvious. Yes, academia’s elites can be suffocating, insular, and unfriendly to outsiders. Tell me something I don’t already know. Occasionally Awad describes Sam’s surroundings—usually dark landscapes, perhaps wind through the trees, chills, that sort of thing. Nothing in particular excited me about this being a campus novel, per se, especially since entire chapters take place either within Sam’s neurotic brain or inside her (or another’s) apartment. I could relate to some of her feelings about the pressures of academia, but that was sort of… it.

Awad aims at some lofty themes here, most of which I can’t be bothered to remember at this point. But aside from what I’ve already mentioned above, there is some interesting hints of discussion about trauma and transformations and female power. Again, I just didn’t find any of particularly compelling or innovative. Many of the reviews also claimed this book was gruesome and disturbing, but as I read on, I kept waiting for this so-called disturbing material to appear. This will sound snobbish and perhaps it is, but maybe that is only the case if your usual repertoire is Booktok books. Nothing really scared or surprised me or pulled at my heartstrings here. There are valid criticisms to be made of academia, and I did see some hints of that from Awad, but her engagement with them left a lot wanting.

I read on to see just how Awad would tidy up all the loose ends, and the end result largely fell flat. There were aspects I had more or less seen coming. The book started off rather interesting, developing its mystery well, but like an unprepared grad student facing an impossibly close deadline, the final third of the book veers off into further delusions and an extremely messy concluding arc. I think I’ll just go and try to read The Secret History again. This book definitely was not for me, but judging by the other reviews, don’t let that necessarily scare you off if you think it may be for you.