Bunny

I'm not sure if Mona Awad intended Bunny to embody exactly the kind of hollow, edgy, art-school garbage that she's supposedly skewering in it – maybe she's just too meta and clever for me! – but that was what I felt, and I wasn't a fan. I was fully on board at first, enjoying the writing and setup, but the shine started coming off a quarter of the way in, and continued coming off until I had no goodwill left.

The main character, Samantha, is a real slog. She starts out a not-like-other-girls craven whinger, waxing misogynistic about how pink and air-headed she judges the women in her peer group to be; how they're creepy, borderline non-human bimbos, unlike her, a real person; and how, despite hardly knowing each other, she supposes they hate her for being so gritty and different. We get it, Samantha. You hate pink and collect vinyl. Whatever. She doesn't get any more compelling as the story goes on.

In general, I just couldn't buy into the characters' ages and environment. They're supposed to be post-graduate adults, but the melodrama and awkwardness that drive every character interaction feel acutely teenaged. Samantha, who can barely say hello without breaking into cold sweats, reads more like a 15-year-old than a 25-year-old with a degree and work experience. The limp character work didn't put me in the mood for the book's meandering flights of fancy, which make up most of it.

Bunny is littered with pop-culture references that I found cheap and grating. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gets repeatedly referenced in a lazy attempt to make something intertextual happen. Characters are described as having Game of Thrones hair, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind smiles, and David Bowie eyes. (David Bowie didn't have different-coloured eyes, and it is so, so easy to Google this!)

The writing's otherwise mostly fine, but it's in service of a nonsense, nothing plot, and I don't know how rookie stinkers like “bearing” instead of “baring”, “break” instead of “brake”, and “unphased” instead of “unfazed” (twice) made it through the editorial net. The cumulative effect is of a book that isn't nearly as smart, cool or incisive as it thinks it is. It's got that Yellowface energy of a rich academic author trying to write something scathing but accidentally committing self-parody. It also reminded me of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, another monstrous-feminine horror-thriller that falls over itself trying to be clever, but I found Nightbitch much more credible and accomplished than this. Almost two stars, but I'm not feeling generous.