Book Review: ‘Bunny’ by Mona Awad (dark academia or just weird?)
‘Bunny’ is the weirdest books I’ve read all year, and you know what? I had a huge amount of fun reading it.
It was the second novel that we picked for season three of ‘The Dark Academicals’ and you can listen to the full episode here:
The whole intention behind ‘The Dark Academicals’ is to explore whether the titles that are reviewed and marketed as dark academia, actually are. Using a group of elements that we deem the tenets of the genre based on Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’, we evaluate whether the book really lives up the genre.
‘Bunny’ has taken over TikTok and appears on every single dark academia reading list so we knew it had to feature on the podcast.
At the prestigious and highly selective Warren University, Samantha shares her creative writing seminar with the Bunnies. A group of uber-close, rich girls in frothy dresses who fawn over each other’s work, constantly hug and call each other Bunny. Sam hates them.
But when the Bunnies invite her join one of their Smut Salons, she’s inextricably drawn into their fascinating and fantastical world where fairytales meet ‘Frankenstein’ and nothing is quite as it seems.
Have I said that this book is weird? It’s weirder than that.
I really enjoyed the reading experience for the majority of this novel, even if I was confused for a lot of it, as it really encapsulates that insular and all-consuming feeling of higher education in the arts. The writing really reflects that pretension of some of the content that comes from those seminars too. It’s a really interesting satire. But I do also think that it gets a little lost in that satire and what it’s trying to say about these settings, the people in them and the work created.
The question of what is real and what is not real is a big question throughout the novel, for both Sam and the reader, and it created a sort of haze over the the latter part of the novel, but when this question is answered it lost a little of it’s oomph for me and I ended feeling a little unsatisfied.
But I really loved the writing. Sentence by sentence, Awad is a masterful writer and I’m even more excited than I was before to pick up ‘All’s Well’ some time soon.
Do I recommend it? Yes, I do. It’s a real ride and there’s so much to think about and talk about, especially with so many interpretations of the themes, symbols and reveals available.
This is an incredibly difficult book to review articulate, because so much of it is subjective, but hopefully we do a little better at it in this week’s podcast episode. You can listen right here!
But is ‘Bunny’ dark academia? Not for us. Strange, surrealist, speculative fiction, sure. But it’s not dark academia.
If you love dark academia as much as we do then please consider subscribing to our podcast! We release new episodes fortnightly.
Written by Sophie
