Bunny Review
’Tis the season for dark academia. I’ve been wanting to read Bunny since it came out last year. I treated myself to a book shopping binge for my birthday this year because birthday and also what else am I going to do with my time/money/entire life???
I am always in search of a literary Caroline who is not a raging bitch and I thought this one might be it. No such luck, but I still enjoyed my journey through the insanity that is Bunny. It seemed like a standard dark academia novel for the first hundred pages, but when it got to the first twist, I audibly yelled “what?!” which colored the entire rest of my reading experience. Bunny is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read and I really enjoyed the nuts story.
Samantha gets drawn into a cliquish group of girls in her grad school cohort who love cutesy things and call each other “Bunny.” Samantha and her friend Ava come up with nicknames for the girls — Cupcake (Caroline), Creepy Doll (Kira), Vignette (Victoria), and Duchess (Eleanor) — and how Samantha refers to the girls in the group changes as her relationship to them changes. When she derides them with Ava, she uses their nicknames. When she starts spending some time with them, she uses their real names. When she becomes a member of their group, she refers to them all as “Bunny.” In this phase, all the dialogue gets tagged as being spoken by “Bunny,” and the members of the group, including Samantha, lose their individual identities. Eventually, Samantha gets some distance from being a part of this group and regains her own identity, and regresses back to referring to the Bunnies as their nicknames.
The relationships in Bunny are very relatable for anyone who has been part of a cohort, been part of a close group of women, or have a want for belonging. The overlying weirdness of the plot is what makes the book different from other books, but the point of the book is close relationships and how they can fall apart in violent and destructive ways. The cold and academic setting is perfect for autumn and the beginning of the academic year. Would recommend with a warm fire and a PSL.
