Overall: 3.5/5 stars
Blurb: We call them Bunnies because that is what they call each other. Seriously. Bunny.
Samantha Heather Mackey is an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at Warren University. In fact, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort - a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other 'Bunny'.
But then the Bunnies issue her with an invitation and Samantha finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door, across the threshold, and down their rabbit hole.
Blending sharp satire with fairytale horror, Bunny is a spellbinding trip of a novel from one of fiction's most original new voices.
Oh Bunny, what a ride you were. To oversimplify, Bunny is a novel which follows a MFA student, Samantha as she tries to navigate relationships at Warren university. Namely, the relationship with her best friend Ava, and with a clique of girls in her creative writing class, dubbed The Bunnies.
However, the book is really about so much more than that, a satirical, unreliable, at times, eccentric tale that combines fantasy with reality in a way that leaves me wanting to google how other people analyzed the ending of the text.
I think this is a book that I’d respect other people giving a five star rating to, it’s beautifully written and has an exceptional narrative voice. However, it’s also a book in which you need to almost blindly trust the author, and I found myself asking for the first 200 pages whether the author deserved, or rather, had earned, this trust?
For example, in a scene where a boy’s head explodes (114) I didn’t have quite enough faith in the author to know whether this worked for me, or whether the surrealism of the book had become too much. Of course, the scene, as the rest of the book, was beautifully, if not immaculately, written. But I struggled with the content and weather I quite believed what was happening. If you can even choose to believe in fiction in that sense.
A way that this book excelled was in its crude and grotesqueness, something that I, maybe controversially, adore from fiction. Such as when the protagonist goes on a thought tangent about Goldilocks masturbating in front of the Three Bears (115) or, in my personal favorite scene of the book, when an (insinuated) rabbit boy eats the flesh of other rabbits, and the vivid ripping and eating imagery that the author evokes (284) in the cannibalism.
The protagonist's voice was clear, and the text had some golden lines such as ‘...snow falling like bright, quick fish.’ (269) and ‘...leaning against the doorframe in his scary-sexy way, a handsome, evil tree.’ (289)
I did, eventually, surrender myself into the book and trust the author, and I can pinpoint this happening at Chapter 18 (118). I theorize this is because the language became a little less intense/we get pulled back from the protagonist just a smidgeon but it offers the breathing room that I desperately needed.
However, I think the biggest payoff in this book comes from the protagonist's relationship with her mentor, whom she dubs ‘The Lion.’ Throughout the text it is hinted that something happened between them that the protagonist keeps claiming is nothing but the actions (or, more of, avoidance) of the two characters continue to contradict this.
When it is eventually revealed what happened between them (333) it’s an exceptional, anti-climatic climax. Because, unlike what the rumors, foreshadowing, or viewer expectations would leave you to believe nothing is exactly what did happen between them.
Moreover, it is the fact that after Samantha pours her heart out to The Lion, he simply says, and continues to say nothing. And that is the emotional payoff I was waiting for. I’ve neer seen a book articulate this concept so well, and I was pretty blown away about how cleverly this book did just that.
Rounding out the whole text, I thought the ending was clever and exceptionally well rounded and I left the story feeling fulfilled narratively, and touched on a more personal level. This book made me feel things, and that’s something I’ll always appreciate from literature.
Ultimately, I would recommend this book for people who like an unreliable narrator and rich language. While it was a slow start for me I devoured the second half of this text and struggled to put it down. It's a book I would certainly come back to in the future, and be interested in how it would develop on a re-read.
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