Bunny swings for something audacious and lands half the shots. The other half? They sail past, trailing ambition and leaving bewilderment in their wake.
Here's the thing: Awad understands spectacle. She grasps the mechanics of menace wrapped in pastel, the grotesque hiding beneath surface-level cuteness. Samantha—our narrator, lonely and prone to elaborate fictions—gets pulled into the orbit of four girls who call themselves Bunny, who exist in some liminal space between MFA workshop satire and body-horror nightmare. The premise crackles. Friendship as possession. Creation as destruction. Narrative unreliability as both shield and weapon.
But the execution snags. Consistently.
The surrealism that should unsettle instead becomes exhausting. Awad piles image upon image—grotesque fauna, melting bodies, rabbits as metaphor and literal horror—but without emotional through-line, the strangeness reads as performance rather than revelation. You recognize the author working very hard to be strange, and that recognition kills the strangeness dead.
Samantha's voice is the book's central problem. She's supposedly a pathological liar whose unreliability should make us question everything, yet the narrative never commits to this ambiguity. We oscillate between believing her account and suspecting it's warped—but not in ways that deepen the thriller. Instead, this wavering feels like the author hasn't decided what story to tell, so she's telling all of them at once, badly.
The Bunnies themselves—the four girls—remain sketch-thin despite being the novel's predatory engine. They function as collective menace rather than individual humans. What made them this way? What do they actually want beyond creating grotesque sculptures? The novel poses these questions and then sidesteps them, preferring atmosphere to anatomy.
And the workshop scenes—this is where the book truly deflates. The supposedly transgressive "creations" emerge as adolescent edgeliness dressed up in purple prose. There's shock value but no real stakes, no genuine consequence that lands emotionally. You sense Awad enjoying the transgression more than exploring what transgression actually costs.
The body horror elements read dated now, recycled from a specific moment of internet-driven surrealism. The grotesque became its own aesthetic cliché faster than anyone anticipated, and Bunny—published in 2019—already feels trapped in that amber.
What bothers me most: the book mistakes being opaque for being profound. Genuine ambiguity serves mystery. This just feels withholding, like the author is playing keep-away with the reader and calling it depth. We're supposed to excavate meaning from Samantha's contradictions, but there's only so much analysis can do when the narrative offers no handholds.
The ending especially dissatisfies—a turn toward violence that arrives with all the emotional weight of a shrug. After 300+ pages of surreal accumulation, the finale doesn't crack the code. It just ends, leaving you with fragments and the suspicion that the emperor's clothes aren't just transparent—they were never there.
Here's what saves it from one star: Awad has genuine stylistic flair. Sentences snap with dark humor. The initial premise hooks immediately. The early chapters possess real dread. She's clearly talented; Bunny just reads like a talented writer overextending herself, mistaking excess for depth.
It's a book that works better in concept than execution—better summarized at parties than actually read.