Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Bunny

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Bunny by Mona Awad

125 reviews

meeklovestoread's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

This book was "interesting". However, I legit never knew what was going on, and although the events that transpired were psychotic, like a literal fever dream. I kid you not sometimes I thought this book was just a product of Samantha's stories because in the book it mentions how dark and twisted Samantha's stories are (that was not the case). This book was really hyped so I read it, but I can't really say that I enjoyed my experience reading it. This story had no purpose. Like what was the point of anything that happened?!😭😂

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fflur's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I think this book is quite widely misunderstood (and to be fair, easily so). I have seen a lot of different theories online as to what really happened, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but how I interpreted is detailed in the spoiler below. It can be hard to tell exactly what's going on at certain parts of the story, making it confusing and disorienting to the readers, however I just think that's mona awad trying to 'share' the feelings samantha is experiencing as a result of what i believe her condition to be.

Spoiler

I think the book details Samantha's experiences with schizophrenia. Throughout the book, we are given hints as to the fact that she is schizophrenic:
- her mother telling her to 'come back to reality'
- the lion not knowing how to deal with her after she 'spilled her words' aka revealed her mental state & leaving him unsure of how to interact with her
- the sudden appearance of a large amount of bunnies & her talking to them
- the old lady on the bus going through the schizophrenic check list while appearing like samantha's grandmother and having spiders crawl over her (samantha's biggest phobia)
- the kidnapping scene where she's discovered by a janitor

It's about her being alone as a result of this, not able to connect to others and others not knowing how to help her - from the bunnies (the distance they kept from her prior to her joining them) to ursula (the christmas dinner scene), with jonah being the only one who seems to want to extend a hand. However, though it's clear jonah isn't hallucinated (he is described being unlike ava, who's described as having eyes that shift colours), at the end of the book when she is talking to jonah and 'the mud' responds to her, it's unclear whether or not she hallucinated his response.

Ava, from her unexplainable disappearances to her changing appearance to samanatha's obsession with her, is a hallucination - someone who she has made up to find a home in.

Max/byron/hud/icarus, or whatever you want to call him, is also a hallucination, and as samantha starts to get a firmer grip on reality, her hallucinations - ava and max - both leave her, for different reasons.

i think the book details a very interesting take on schizophrenia, showing how confusing and disorienting hallucinations can be, and showing how samantha desperately tries to get a grasp on reality.

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bold_badger's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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bekiethebanished's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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mbayram's review against another edition

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challenging dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

İt's confusing as all hell.

İ know some people really enjoyed that but İ didn't find the characters likeable or interesting enough to enjoy it myself. Awad is an excellent writer and i enjoyed the structure or ~the body~ ;) but the plot was a bit hard to follow. That may be because İ listened to the audiobook though, so İ think I'd rate the book higher for paperback. The ending especially felt out of nowhere even though it did have sufficient lead up? İdk it's worth a try if you're into funky stuff but definitely need to be in the mood for it and i highly suggest a physical copy instead of audiobook.

İ wouldn't say it's scary but it's got horror elements so if you're sensitive to that beware.

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lifeonasofa's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

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lexigrce's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

i wish i had physically read this instead of listening to an audiobook bc i found it very hard to follow and idk if that’s bc it is or just bc it was an audiobook. it had a lot of good and intriguing ideas but none of them really got fleshed (lol) out for me

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alexandrabelze's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

wow. just wow. this is the first mona awad novel i’ve read and i was not disappointed. it’s gory and absurd and downright disturbing. i loved it. i never had any clue what was going to happen next, and i was always pleasantly surprised at what she had in store. there was so much symbolism and so many metaphors and i’m sure i didn’t even catch them all. the characters were so full-fledged and yet so empty? since we were seeing everyone and everything through samantha’s eyes, there was this veil of blissful ignorance draped over everything. i would have loved to get a peek into what the bunnies saw.

Spoiler

my favorite part of the whole book has to be max’s whole “performance piece” with the bunnies in the cave. watching their perfect, carefully curated, fake identities collapse was so satisfying and mildly humorous.

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coinofstone's review against another edition

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dark funny medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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meleah_neely's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This book, much like the other reviews will tell you, was not at all what I expected going into it. While it is often described as The Secret History meets Heathers, I argue that it comes off more as a critique of the academia as told through a cynical Patrick Bateman (meshing that with the gritty humor and gore, you get a tale that's funny, weird, a little horrific, and leaves you in a liminal space of "huh?" when you finish reading it). For this, some might enjoy it while others will hate it. For me, I think it's a good read, but certainly, not one that you should try to make sense of on your own. It was not until seeing other reviews on Reddit and Quora that I truly believe I figured out where I stood with this story, and I recommend that others do the same thing upon reading the book. The one thing I will say is that I wish the ending went a bit slower— for a text that aimed to focus so clearly on the Body and Body horror especially, I wish the execution examined this a bit more.

Now, for those who have read the book and want my opinion (aka spoilers), here's what I made of it:

Spoiler

I thought that this text served more as a metaphor for the writing process than anything else. Some people believe that this is meant to be a story of a schizophrenic woman attempting to find out her place in the world— and ultimately doing that through writing. While I think this assumption is feasible, I find this interpretation to leave out the role of academia in the text. And frankly, if this were to be the point of the text, I would not like this book (instead of making a meaningful piece that critiques the lack of disability justice in academia, you turn mental illness into horror? boo!!!). One of the most impactful aspects of this story, when I read it, was how Sam speaks so candidly about the death of her passions in academia, her struggles to write unless she is with Ava (a project that ultimately serves to remind her of her drive and capabilities to create something she loves), and her loneliness as she navigates what truly makes a writer when with the rich white friend group who, no matter how much they try, cannot do what Sam can do (made most clear on both the night she led Workshop and their desires, jealousy, and fury when faced with Max (another creature that, though so much darker than Ava, is still an original piece of work that they can never recreate)). In the end, I think this text serves as a metaphor for the harshness of the creative writing process and how fine the line really is between creative genius and pure madness. I think that this is what made the text so nice for me, even if when I first read it I wouldn't have been able to put these thoughts together. I certainly want to reread it with more annotation to see if this belief I have still holds, since my brain was not as active as it should have been when reading this. Hence, why I believe it's something like an American Psycho instead of a Heathers.

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