Other words I’ve been keeping track of: space, gesture, and perform. I still don’t quite understand what it means to write about The Body with title caps but I always nod like I do. She describes ‘… the students walking here and there, discussing Derrida and their nose jobs…’, exposes the ridiculousness of the language, and the pompous ideas – It’s frightening stuff and Awad successfully blurs the line between satire and horror.Īlthough the story is rife with wolfmen wearing glitter, decapitations, and campus muggings, the dialogue is alarmingly realistic, probably because Awad skewers campus life and academia so perfectly. John Cusack in Say Anything again, holding up his boom box in the rain again. This means Bunny wants James Dean again, leaning against a wooden post again. “Perhaps then we could draw from film, winkingly indulge in some campy nostalgia,” offers Bunny.

Plus some rituals where the Bunnies conjure men from rabbits, according to their idea of a ‘dream man’ – That was their own private Bunny thing, like Touching Tuesdays or binge-watching The Bachelorette or making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.īut the Bunnies do invite Samantha to their soirée and, ignoring her best friend Ava’s scorn, Samantha enters their strange world, filled with pastel coloured frocks, mini foods, group hugs and mutual adoration. No way in hell they would ever invite me to Smut Salon.

The narrator, Samantha, who privately refers to the Bunnies as the ‘Cuntscapades’, hates their preening, their simpering language, the ‘… A-line hems of their cupcake dresses…’ and the ornate braids in their ‘…Game of Thrones hair.’ Yet despite her outward disdain for the Bunnies, Samantha is morbidly curious about these women whose post-grad experience appears to be far more productive than her own – It begins with a party, or rather a ‘Demitasse’ because ‘… this school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party.’ They attend Warren, a small New England college. In a clear homage to Heathers, Awad has created a story about a clique of post-grad narrative arts students, known as the Bunnies. But be warned, it’s a bizarre book – campus-lit meets magic realism meets what-the-hell-was-that meets Weird Science… Then you probably ought to read Bunny by Mona Awad.

Bunny mona awad review