Reviews with content warning for Car accident - Bunny

On my second reading of Bunny, I felt compelled to write a review. Because I feel as though this book is often misunderstood. Misconstrued as anti-feminist, women-hating-women, overly pretentious. This could not be further from the truth.

Bunny is an exploration of deep unbearable loneliness. It is a study on loving women. It is beautiful and terrifying and masterfully written.

And Samantha hates the Bunnies, yes, but she also loves them. She wants to be them. She loves them so much, because what they have is what she has never had. And they love her, too. Yes, they are twisted, and fucked up, and awful, but they are, like Samantha, just women. When she gives them a chance, takes them up on the smut salon, she gets everything she has ever wanted and it is intoxicating and terrifying and it is awful, because when you’re a college age girl with little to no friends you desperately want the cliquey best friends to be awful, because then you’re not only not missing out, you’re better than them. Bunny is a story about how you’re not.

And Ava. My god, Ava is heartbreaking. This is the part that isn’t a rant about perceptions of the book, but about what I loved about it so much. I loved the weird bunny boys and the gore and the exploding heads and the drugs but I also love how Ava is portrayed.

She is textually in love with Ava, she loves Ava so much and it breaks my HEART how it ends. It is genius that Max is Sam, and Sam is in love with Ava, so Max is in love with Ava. It is such a fantastic portrayal of understanding your feelings for a woman, but being unable to admit them properly to even yourself. That Max destroys the bunnies because she wants to destroy the bunnies. Ugh.

It’s seriously a thrilling, heartbreaking, wonderful read. I truly recommend it.

Content Warnings

tkatt20's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This was not what I had hoped it was going to be. I was under the impression that this book was a horror/thriller about a cult that was really dark and twisted and had a big plot twist. Maybe if you're not looking too closely then this could be considered that, but not by much. There is a small and pretty predictable plot twist, that you only understand if you're actually paying attention to every detail, but otherwise I didn't find this very thrilling. Now that is totally on me for not understanding what I was getting into, but even if I had been under the right impression, I dont think I would have liked this at all. I'd say I was semi interested for the first 40% but after that it was just utter confusion. The entire book completely flips in content and pacing without much warning or explanation, so the entire time i was trying to connect things that didn't make sense together. I love a good unreliable narrator just like the next person, but once I'm spending more time trying to decipher whats real and what isn't, then you've lost me. It became clear very early that our main character was struggling with some sort of mental illness, but even without her I really didn't care about a single character. The writing style was interesting but became so repetitive, I mean, you can only read the word "bunny" so many times before going insane. There is a good 1/3 of the book that doesn't seem to fit pacing and content wise, that probably could have been omitted without much consequence. I can kind of see what the author was going for here, but with so many unanswered questions I can see why it gets lost on so many who read this. This would be perfect for you if you are looking for something slow-paced and open-ended, but if you want the vibes of a classic thriller then I'd look elsewhere. All in all, I would say this is not what it's advertised as, it's more like a story about a very lonely girl struggling with normal people things.

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