bunny

this book is weird, good-weird or bad-weird i'm still trying to figure that part out. 

i definitely had my exciting, "what is going on?" moments while reading bunny, but at the same time i also found myself getting bored. the plot held my interest during the first half of the book, but in the second half my excitement started to dwindle and i found that my eyes were starting to skim through paragraphs. 

in totality, i think that awad should have considered aging the characters down to undergraduate college students or even to high school students since it would have made the behavior of these characters more plausible. while reading this book i kept imaging these women as college freshman because of how immature they acted towards one another. no adult woman who is old enough to attend graduate school, speaks like the bunnies or holds this irrational resentment towards other women the way that samantha does.

one thing i want to preface about bunny, is that it is confusing if you don't pay close enough attention. putting my ego aside, i found this book confusing. for me, i didn't read this book in one sitting or even on consecutive days, but over a span of time where i often took pauses. therefore, a lot of the minute details were lost on me. but that isn't the books fault in any way, shape, or form. it just means i'm due for a re-read. 

skipping ahead to when the novel reveals the hidden secret the bunnies are keeping within their group, there is little context or explanation given about their actions. while i was definitely surprised, I was left with so many unanswered questions. their excuse for creating these "frankenstein" type boys is for a literary exploration of the body, but i just find that stupid. i'm not sure how turning one's fictional boy crush into a real person relates to writing in any form. it is also never addressed how the bunnies were able to find out killing bunnies, the animal, would create boys. it is even more ridiculous to think about a bunch of adult women killing a bunny just for fun and finding out that it has magical consequences. there are just so many questions i had about their "workshop" that were never explained or detailed. 

speaking of confusion, there was a lot of ambiguity surrounding ava's character. i thought that she was a swan turned into a human being, but the idea that she only existed in samantha's head never dawned over me. but then again, samantha's mental state never came into question for me while reading. 

a component i enjoyed was the dark academia facets of the book. the writing institution was pretentious and over the top. the elitist dynamic amongst the bunnies and then samantha was enticing. 

overall, i was somewhat entertained reading this book especially in the first half, but i definitely think that i would need to read it again in order to get the full scope of everything that this novel has to offer.