Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I am exhausted.

Bunny by Mona Awad

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I watch them tug at him with a fury that no doubt they put into their graduate school applications. An endlessly entitled fury that will drive them toward the shiny pretty things of this world and not stop until they have claimed them. ― Mona Awad, Bunny CBR16 Bingo: Rage I did not finish this book. I enjoy complicated, messy, unlikeable characters. But the only person I could stand was the poet whom everyone ostracized. Maybe that was the point all along. Samantha Mackey (Smackie) […]

Rouge: this was a fever dream

Rouge by Mona Awad

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mood music: Possede – emma peters I really enjoyed this book. It was a strange combination of Snow White meets Alice in Wonderland meets Eyes Wide Shut. The nonlinear structure of the story works well due to Awad’s ability to bring the reader into the dream-like experience happening to the protagonist, rather than feeling like an observer of a very confusing situation. Plot synopsis-wise, I’ll be brief because this book is a little hard to describe if you haven’t already read it. The story follows […]

Kill Your Darlings

Bunny by Mona Awad

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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 […]

Rabbit Season

Bunny by Mona Awad

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Samantha Heather Mackey is a second-year graduate student in the creative writing program at Warren University, an idyllic Northeastern campus surrounded by a grimy, dangerous, urban area. Her fiction workshop consists, for the second consecutive year, of just five students, all women. Samantha is most definitely the odd one out. The other four students have formed the ultimate clique. They seem to operate with a hive-mind, to the point where they all call each other by the same nickname: Bunny. Excessively girly and obsessed with […]

Maladaptive Daydreaming

Bunny by Mona Awad

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No matter how Samantha loathes the cliche of girls who make up the rest of her writing group, with their overwrought work and their insistence on referring to each other as ‘Bunny,’ she can’t help but get sucked into their strange world when they invite her to join them. This is a dark and satirical read which pokes plenty of fun at the pretentious streak that can run deep in the people who attend MFA programs – considering the author was one of them, the […]

“‘Willfully withholding. Unnecessarily inaccessible. Not delivering on its premise.'”

Bunny by Mona Awad

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You know those moments when you’re battling a fever, you’re in and out of fitful sleep, and you’re not entirely sure what is real and what is imagined? Those fever tinged experiences that you just want to be over but time stretches way beyond what it should be allowed to stretch? That was what reading Bunny was like. Samantha is a Narrative Arts graduate student at Warren, a prestigious university known for its experimental approach to both pedagogy and writing style it tries to pull out […]



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