“Can I take your coat?” Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.”
Samantha is part of an all female cohort in an MFA program in New England. Her MFA program prides itself in being highly selective and highly experimental. Samantha hates it. She wouldn't find it all that unbearable if the other girls in her cohort weren't so insufferable. The other girls seem to be in some intense friendship where one girl is indistinguishable from the next. They call each other "bunny" lovingly and dress in over the top macabre printed dresses. Samantha hates them, but finds herself accepting their invitation to attend a gathering with them. What she discovers is far stranger than she ever could have imagined.
Listen, I picked this book up because the publisher advertised it using comparisons like "The Heathers meets Mean Girls". The Heathers is my favorite 80s movie of all time. It is so comedically dark and campy. The concept is absurd, but also so juicy, once you watch it for the first time, you will find yourself at war with whether you want to see if through more or turn it off more. Christian Slater has that "is-he-a- hot-bad-boy-or- unhinged-psychopath-thing" going on, that I personally find irresistible in all fictional renderings. Lastly, The Heathers has that "It" quality. It has some unknown magical combination of things that makes it work when it really, really shouldn't have. This long winded fan-girl review of The Heathers is all to say, my expectation level for this book versus the reality of it were SO very off. Bunny is a lot of things, but all of the things that it is do not add up to anything near as magically magnetic as The Heathers. Do not go into Bunny expecting anything and you might enjoy it a whole lot more than I did.
When I first started this book, I was FREAKING OUT. I loved it. I loved this weird cult-ish clique of over the top girls that talk like valley-girls, but dress like monster high barbie dolls. I loved the main characters hatred for them that turned into a sort of curious obsession. It was weird, sure but so original. This honeymoon phase lasted a couple chapters and then the mystery behind the clique is revealed and I just lost interest. It was so out of touch with reality in its over-the-top nature, that I just felt bored and disconnected from it. Mostly I was disappointed because the dark quirkiness this book promised only held up so far.
I think I have talked about this in other book reviews, but there is a plot twist in this novel that is one of my greatest plot-twist pet peeves. Anytime this twist reveals itself I automatically start deducting the star rating in my mind. this went from 3.5 stars to 2.5 stars to 2 stars REAL QUICK there towards the end. I called it early on, because I hate this plot twist so much, that I have learned how to translate the foreshadowing to save myself time reading books that are bending in this directions. Maybe one day I will make an entire blog post detailing the reasons I hate this type of plot-twist soooo much, but for now I'll leave you guessing because on the off chance this review makes you curious enough to pick Bunny up, I don't want to spoil anything.
Anyway, I don't even know how to close this review up. Go watch the Heathers and leave this book in the obscure genre-bending pool of weirdness it belongs in. Or pick it up. I'm not your mom, do what you want.
2 Stars
content warning: lots of: blood guts, gore and general gross-out moments, possible mental health representations, self harm, animal abuse, implied drug use, alcohol abuse.
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