In her column “Rage on the Page,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books about anger in women’s literature.

This review contains spoilers.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

“Because I love you, Bunny. Actually. You’re actually my favorite.”

This single, biting quote encapsulates the sinister and emotional chaos of “Bunny” by Mona Awad, a novel that defies easy definition. Part dark academia, part surrealist nightmare and part satire, “Bunny” takes you down a rabbit hole (pun intended) of obsession, loneliness and the monstrous cost of belonging.  

Awad introduces the reader to Samantha Heather Mackey, a graduate student in a prestigious Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at Warren University. She’s an outsider, sarcastic and sharp-edged, watching from the periphery as her cohort — self-proclaimed “Bunnies” — prance through their rituals designed to bring life to fictional men. 

The Bunnies are a clique of wealthy, almost cartoonishly saccharine women who call each other “Bunny” and exist in a universe so cloyingly sweet, it’s sickening. Don’t let their tea parties and cooking fool you — beneath their soft, pink veneer lies something dark. Something horrifying.

Something weird.  

Then, Samantha receives her invitation to the Bunny clique’s infamous “workshop,” and the novel veers into the surreal. What begins as a satire of creative writing programs and toxic female friendships quickly mutates into something far more twisted. The workshops, we learn, involve “literal creation” — rituals where the Bunnies mold their idealized visions of men from flesh and fur, with horrifyingly grotesque results.  

In the novel, Awad brilliantly captures the duality of Samantha’s existence: her disdain for the Bunnies (“Me. Samantha Heather Mackey. Who is not a Bunny. Who will never be a Bunny”) and her desperate need for connection. 

Awad’s writing is laced with humor and chilling vulnerability as Samantha’s own identity unravels (“When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking.”) Awad uses Samantha’s vulnerability and longing as the emotional engine of the story, exposing the dark underbelly of wanting to belong so badly you lose yourself in the process.  

Bunny is a story about power: the power of cliques, of toxic friendships and of storytelling itself. Samantha’s self-awareness is her greatest weapon and her greatest curse. She knows the Bunnies are dangerous, shallow and manipulative. Yet, she’s drawn to their sugary world because it promises what her lonely, outsider existence cannot: acceptance, even if it comes at the cost of her sanity.  

This tension is brilliantly encapsulated in Samantha’s interactions with the Bunnies. Awad expertly toes the line between their saccharine sweetness and the sinister undercurrent of their rituals (“I miss you, Bunny. This summer was so hard without you. I barely wrote a word, I was so, so sad. Let’s never ever part again, please?”)

The prose perfectly mirrors the book’s thematic layers: syrupy on the surface but dark and unsettling underneath. Awad’s prose is razor-sharp, blending laugh-out-loud satire with unimaginable horror. She skewers the pretentiousness of MFA programs, the cloying intimacy of certain female friendships and the pressures of artistic creation, all while maintaining a dreamlike tone.  

One of the novel’s most haunting aspects is how it uses storytelling as both a means of control and an escape. Samantha’s narration is unreliable, but her ability to craft narratives — both for herself and others — is her way of reclaiming power in a world where she feels invisible.  

“‘Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?’ my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”  

Samantha’s storytelling mirrors the Bunnies’ own act of creation, turning fiction into a grotesque reality.  

“Bunny” is not for the faint of heart or faint of mind. It’s a book that demands your full attention as it takes you through layers of absurdity, horror and heartbreak. It’s confusing — but beautifully so. Mona Awad’s writing is exquisite, balancing the macabre and the hilarious in a way that’s both unsettling and wildly entertaining.  

For readers who’ve ever felt like outsiders, “Bunny” offers a cathartic look at what happens when we crave belonging too much. It’s a tale of metamorphosis — both literal and metaphorical — that will leave you questioning the boundaries between reality and fiction long after the final page.