Book Review: Bunny by Mona Awad

 ´They liken me to Woolf, to Borges, their praise as lavish as their handbags´.

Hilarious and daring, Bunny by Mona Awad is a Gothic story about an MFA (which is Master of Fine Arts) went wild. I´ve heard good and bad about this book, but since Cursed Bunny I have a secret curiosity about writings featuring this apparently innocent animals. A creative mind can do everything about them, and the sky is only the limit.

Samantha, a socially outcast with a lot of imagination, got suddenly accepted in a group of successful girls, calling each other Bunny and intensively focused on their literary assignments. They are everything Samatha is not right now: rich - although we are not shared too much about their families - pink elegant, love cupcakes, drive fancy cars and do have enough time to think about weird experiments. After all, they are expected to be creative and test the limits of their own power and imagination, as well as to refuse stereotypes of all kinds - assuming the risk of becoming stereotypical themselves. 

The writing is really creative - after all, Awad herself is teaching creative writing - and the ideas are daring: how far creativity should go, and how far - away from reason and common sense - creative vibe can take you. Also, it´s ironically featuring the bourgeois limitations of the domain, showing that one cannot run aimlessly for an art beyond art unless completely loosing ground of oneself.

Personally, I would have be more curious to find out more about those Bunnies, their lives, secrets and failures, and projecting them perfectly slim as characters does not help the story. Samatha, on the other hand, is portrayed in all her insecurities and particularly loved how the details of her personal life - the crook father, the deceased mother - are entering the story in a very smooth unexpected way, exactly when those details were more needed.

Somehow, I´ve expected more about this story, as it alternates between very bold episodes and wandering along the imagination maze which are wondrously crafted and symbolical but don´t advance the story at all. It´s like a beautiful intermezzo ending up abruptly.

Mona Awad is definitely an author I can´t wait to read more about. Bunny is a challenge of imagination and a defy of the bourgeois MFA system, but somehow I felt I needed a different take or direction.

Rating: 3.5 stars