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 of its students. Samantha’s classmates are a clique of four bubbly, effusive women who all call each other Bunny. They seem to speak their own language and understand each other on a level that Samantha never could nor would ever want to. Samantha’s only friend is a woman named Ava, an anarchist who hates the Bunnies because they are antithetical to everything she believes. But Samantha abandons Ava when the Bunnies invite her over for a party. Everything spirals out of control and out of reality quickly after.
That’s really all I can say about the plot because (A) if you read this, you should go in blind and (B) I don’t think you would believe me if I did write out more of the plot. It’s absolutely bizarre, I’ll say that much.
Over all, I just didn’t like this book. The characters were awful, the plot was barely there, and the writing style was not my cup of tea. I frequently did not know what was going on. Awad so fully wraps Samantha up into the cult of Bunnies that all five lose their identities entirely which makes following a conversation near impossible. Plus there’s the whole ritualistic-cult-animal thing that is never explained in the slightest. I don’t need complete explanations in books, but enough that I can fill in the pieces myself would be nice. But this was like looking at ten facedown pieces of a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle and being asked to guess what the picture is.
The only level on which I think Bunny works is as a metatext. The cohort of graduate students are led primarily by a woman nicknamed Fosco or KareKare, depending who you ask. Her analysis and feedback of the cohorts’ works strike cords with my own interpretation of Bunny itself. I have to believe that was on purpose.
BINGO – FAUNA