Bunny started out really strong for me, it ended okish…I think…but I mostly wanted to get off the ride once we hit the middle, and the middle is LONG. We follow Sam in her final year at Warren College (eyeroll for the cuteness there) as she’s finishing up her MFA. Much like Mean Girls and Clueless have very clear cliques that don’t necessarily exist in the natural world quite so clearly, they exist here at Warren. We have the sweet stoner poet Jonah, Ava, Sam’s best friend who is just the “coolest” (this is sarcasm–think Jane Lane but even edgier with no soft side!), Ava’s love interest Max, we’ve got Sam (our heroine), who is “not like the other girls” because of height, temperament, the things she’s seen and experienced, and we have The Bunnies. Sam names the Bunnies cutesy names to go with the stereotypical cutesy behaviors/clothes and the way they call themselves Bunny. I gotta be honest, reading this book as a middle aged woman it screamed, “I’m a better artist/writer/creator than you because I’m edgy because I think women who embrace pink, girlishness, and stereotypical femininity are dumb”. I can guarantee you that at one point in my life as a brooding Creative Writing major, I probably would’ve identified hard with Sam and with the story more than I’d care to say. I’m glad I’ve grown up.
I was fully invested in the book to start because as the semester kicks off, the Bunnies invite Sam to a “workshop of creativity” in their home. There she is embraced by them. She begins dressing like them, acting and talking like them and oh yeah…bunnies start getting axed (probably metaphorically). It very much felt like a coven of cotton candy pink witches with the delicious idea that something sinister was going to happen. And in some ways, very sinister things did happen. But they also didn’t happen. Or perhaps they were all metaphors for the writing process? Or maybe because Derrida was tossed out there in one of the first few chapters we’re supposed to look at this book from a deconstructionist lens…which I guess I could, but I’m old and I’m tired and I’ve done enough deconstruction for a lifetime. I wanted the book to be as good as the glowing reviews, and at moments it was! In other moments, it was a tedious slog of the author proving that she was smarter than the reader and that the writing process/the creative process takes a toll on the writer. I’m sad to report that I recommended this book to my friend the other day when I was about 80 pages in. I look forward to her phone call when she asks me what exactly I was thinking doing that to her. Yay me!
I declined to give it stars (not because it doesn’t deserve any, but because I don’t know how to adequately rate it). I guess the author DID make me do a little deconstruction because parts of it are brilliant. However, the rest of it is not.
ETA: Someone likened this book to The Secret History which is why I picked it up in the first place. If you haven’t read that book, choose that one over this one!