Mona Awad's twisted and hilarious follow-up to 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl expands on classic Queen Bee tropes by transporting them to a setting even more cruel, petty and backbiting than high school--graduate school. In Bunny, a brooding and beleaguered scholarship student must contend with the punishingly effervescent members of her all-female creative writing cohort, discovering to her horror that their fawning affect and carefully curated personas mask a deadly supernatural persuasion.
Struggling through the final year of an elite postgraduate program with which she has long felt disenchanted, Samantha Mackey finds that her passion for writing has been supplanted by repulsed fascination for the other four members of her group. Disgustingly rich, unbearably twee and virtually inseparable, they refer to each other as "Bunny," a habit that Samantha finds grotesque. Assuming her disdain is mutual, Samantha is shocked when the "Bunnies" reach out to befriend her, beckoning her into their candy-colored and tulle-embellished private circle. What seems like a frivolous escape, however, quickly becomes a hallucinatory nightmare, as the balance of power shifts, and lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur.
Awad's flair for the provocative occasionally veers into self-conscious grandstanding (her protagonist, too, is criticized for the "edginess" of her prose). Still, Bunny's gleeful, unapologetic revelry in fantastical revenge play is seductive, gripping and gloriously excessive. Steeped in rank feminine pathos and dripping with psychedelic horror imagery, Bunny is a campy deconstruction of neofeminist artifice, academic class blindness and the sugar-frosted exclusionism they both serve up with an eager, sharp-toothed smile. --Devon Ashby, sales & marketing assistant, Shelf Awareness