(My interpretation of the story follows after the long blocked out spoiler paragraph. Sorry for the long post I just wanted to share this!!!)
Alright, so I just finished Bunny by Mona Awad and it was absolutely not what I was expecting – and that’s exactly what everyone else is saying (I’m mostly talking about GoodRead reviews), but I mean it differently. I’m not talking about it being absolutely crazy or bizarre, because really it wasn’t as bizarre or shocking as everyone tends to say. It is definetely not as Alice in Wonderland as many of the top comments are saying on GoodReads and also not as *”What The Fuck is going on???”* as everyone is saying.
I understand that some people might not get the full plot at first, because it has some difficult twists at some point that might be confusing if you don’t read the book with too much attention. Personally I had no difficulty with understanding the story, but I get why some people might not. Mostly if you’re reading this story over a longer period of time (and not in two days as I did) it might be easy to forget some details that are important to the plot.
In case you didn’t fully understand the full story, or in case you just want to be spoiled – I’ll give a summary of it. I’ll mark it as a spoiler / block it out so don’t worry, just skip the next blocked out long paragraph if you don’t want to be spoiled:
>!So, our main character Samantha attends this fancy Ivy Art School, Warren, in New England. She is an outcast of her all-girl cohort. They’re with five. The other four of them are a clique and call themselves the Bunnies. They act like teenage girls, talk in high pitched voices, act as one big blob and are pretty scary. Samantha hates them. Samantha might not have friends in her cohort, but definetly has one friend outside of school – Ava. After an earlier hartbreak with one of her teachers who she calls the Lion, Samantha created a human being, Ava, out of a white swan. The only twist here is that Samantha doesn’t realise she has created Ava herself. Ava basically being created out of Samantha’s mind becomes her best friend. The Bunnies, the girls of her cohort, actually form a secret cult that creates human like creatures from animals, in their case rabbits (the rabbit’s first explode). The leader of the Bunnies is Eleanor (the Duchess). The Bunnies notice Samantha also has made a human out of an animal and invite her into their cult. Only later they find out that Samantha is not aware of her own ability (Samantha thinks Ava is a real human). From there on the Bunnies, mostly Elleanor, try to brainwash Samantha into their cult. In the end it results in Samantha hating the Bunnies but at the same time actually taking part in their rituals. Their rituals exist of the girls thinking of what they really want, and creating a humanish being out of those wishes and the animal. The Bunnies knowing of Samantha’s great ability (instead of the Bunnies Samantha actually is capable of creating fully functioning humans), they let her lead the ritual for once. The rabbit they let Samantha use doesn’t change into a human nor explodes, it just hops away. The Bunnies are dissapointed, while not knowing Samantha actually created this angry, sexy looking man out of a deer (Samantha spotted the deer earlier outside the house). The deer-man, Max, get’s in a relationship with Ava, (Ava and Max staying close to Samantha because they are a creation of her mind after all). Max knows Samantha hates the Bunnies, and screws them all / embarrasses them all. He actually sets the Bunnies up against eachother. Later the Bunnies realise this and as angry as they are they set out to kill Ava. Samantha finds Ava stabbed, the stabbed body of a swan, and realises Ava was a “Darling” (the name of the creations). Her and Max are going to take revenge, leading in **not** the killing of the Bunnies but the Bunnies being heavily injured and Max changing back into a deer. Samantha has zero of her ‘darlings’ left and only this one friend who ocassianly appeared throughout the book, Jonah (throughout the books she appreciates him more). We are giving the idea she will become better friends with him (maybe get into a relationsip? Who knows…)!<
Alright, I hope that cleared it up a bit. Please let me know if it didn’t. Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was **my interpretation** of the story. This book is indeed, as everyone says, a bit crazy when looking at the gory and cult aspect of it. But it’s about more than that. The book focusses mostly on three things I think.
**The first** theme I found is *the search for a home*. Samantha doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere, >!Until she creates Ava, who is everything she wants when she felt sad and hopeless (the same counting for Max when she’s angry.!< The book is about knowing what you want, what Samantha wants. What is actually important to her, what is actually important for you as a person? What do you look for in another human being?
**The second** thing I noticed is the critique Mona Awad gives at current Art education (and chique Ivy schools in general). With characters as the Bunnies and Fosco she shows how vague, and sometimes rediculous people in the Art Education world can behave – mostly regarding terms as “the Body”and “Performing”. She gives critique at Ivy schools by describing the harsh contrast between the town itself and the school. >!The way the rich students are driving in protected taxi’s scared for the rumours of the aggresive other parts of town besides campus.!<
**And lastly** the book shows how hard it can be to kill your ‘darlings’, to say goodbye to certain people in your life, but even phases of your life >!(Samantha leaving student life behind her but also finds a place for her passed away mother)!<
Over all I think it’s a great book, with maybe a bit of a difficult plot. Also; why does GoodReads clasify this as horror?? I don’t really find it fitting, maybe fantasy would fit better? To be honest I don’t know.
by Matthiezzzzzzz
24 Comments
Hey bunny 🐰 I just finished this book and loved it. I was so excited to get online to see what other people thought about it and was very disappointed to see that most people misunderstood the book. Maybe all of the gore made it hard for people to understand? That, and reading a book with an unreliable narrator is difficult for the first time. Your post is pretty spot on though and I think people will appreciate you breaking it down!
hi [u/Matthiezzzzzzz](https://www.reddit.com/user/Matthiezzzzzzz/) – Thanks so much for the explanation. I just finished, and really missed a lot here. I have a few questions for you, if you don’t mind:
1. How did the Bunnies realize that Ava wasn’t real?
2. Do we know how Samantha created Ava?
Thanks!
Do we think Ava was always meant to be a friend or was Sams love potentially romantic as well.
One thing I didn’t fully grasp was the way the bunnies (the critters) around campus treated Samantha after the first smut salon. She wakes up the next morning, and there is a bunny outside her window. Then they follow her and talk to her, and we know they’re real because Jonah can also see them. He mentions that he talked to a bear, and that they talked for a while, and ultimately he thought the bear just needed someone to tell its story. But I felt like that thread was left loose at the end of the story
Is it possible that all “Darlings” are a figment of their imagination, like a mass hallucination of sorts?
I’m not finished with this book quite yet but I needed to see other people’s take on it.
In the beginning I thought that Samantha was in a mental institution (Her “experimental” and exclusive program) and that her writing workshops were group therapy. The way she describes the chairs huddled together in a circle and how the professor critiques her dark writing. She also mentions her unstable neighbors (including the flasher). It made it seem to me that these were other people in the asylum. When Jonah said that he also spoke to animals, I thought this was an indicator that everyone around her was a little unhinged as well. For some reason I thought the Bunnies were nurses giving her medications (tic tacs and drinks made just for her).
Once we got to the Bunnie’s workshops my theory didn’t seem as likely. Unless she was remembering all of the crimes she committed before being put into the facility. I even thought the “Darlings” might be doctors with their gloved hands.
After reading these posts I can continue reading with a different perspective.
This just blew my mind. I thought I understood most of the book, but apparently I was missing some key parts. Thank you so much!
I just finished Bunny and I have no one to discuss it with, and it’s hopping around in my mind like crazy; then I came across this thread, over a year old, but since I see people occasionally still responding, I’m throwing in a different perspective.
>!I think the OP’s explanation is too literal and seems to miss that Samantha is not your usual unreliable narrator, lying and making things up as she goes, but is actually schizophrenic. We start to glom onto that as it becomes clear that Ava is literally an imaginary friend – she isn’t a magical swan-into-woman creation, she lives only in Samantha’s mind, nobody else can see her. Samantha’s memories of her childhood mostly center around everyone, her mother, the school, a doctor, telling her she’s escaping too far into her fantasies, the stories in her head; and then in Chapter 26, the turning point of the story when Christmas break /the breakdown actually begins, Samantha boards the bus where she will “meet” Max, and there’s the old lady who looks to Samantha like a scary version of her grandmother – but “wearing an insane person’s clothes, with a tattoo of a spider on her neck” (spiders being one of Samantha’s deepest phobias). Samantha hears the woman reading aloud a check list for schizophrenia, saying, oh I have that, and I have that … but it becomes clear this is a hallucination when Samantha says the woman is “whispering the words right into the nape of my neck … taking the words right out of … my mind.” Of course Max’s notebooks are filled with Samantha’s words: she wrote them. The entire novel is told from the mind of a schizophrenic woman whose hold on reality is extremely frail, and often simply non existent.
But she triumphs, and that’s the other and most moving element to the novel, imo – after a long, desperate period of being unable to write, as she struggles with total disassociation and psychosis, Samantha writes. She writes of Ava (as she tells us) but also of the Bunnies, her cohort who are perfectly real but have pointedly excluded her – she writes the book we’ve been reading. Bunny is her thesis. (“It’s very different than what we were expecting,” says The Lion). One can argue over whether the Bunnies “workshops” ever really happened or were psychotic imaginings Samantha fell prey to out of the silence of her loneliness; I tend to think all of the supernatural occurrences were a combination of hallucination and Samantha’s imagination at work as a writer. That’s why some of the bunny-boys were “first drafts” – because she was starting to form the book in her mind, but couldn’t quite grasp it, and why they were called “Darlings”, as in the writers’ common trope of ‘ you have to kill your darlings,’ about any first draft. By the end, having fought for her sanity, taking her work back from the imaginary Max, finishing her thesis, she finally sees people as they really are. The Lion is no Lion but just a regular professor – who couldn’t continue even a platonic friendship with her after she “spilled her words all over his floor”, a night where he saw she was mentally unwell but didn’t know how to cope with it – the same thing happened at Ursula’s thanksgiving dinner. Nobody knows how to help Samantha, brilliant but unmoored, so she has to learn how to help herself. She even finds a place for her mother’s voice to live, outside of her head where it was always chiding her, finally moved out, now only in the sky and only supportive. The women in her cohort are no longer fairy tale characters. They’re not even very interesting (though they certainly are scared of her, after the events – whatever you believe them to be – of the Night of the Axe.)
We don’t know exactly how firmly grounded to the earth Samantha is at the end. We know Jonah is real when Samantha compares him to Ava (“his eyes don’t shift shades. His eyes are one color.”) but everything is left open by the amazing final lines, which are definitely open to interpretation: she tells Jonah he could come with her, then:
“I lower my gaze to the mud. ‘Sure, Samantha,’ said the mud. ‘I’d love to.”!<
Utter brilliance.
Can someone explain their interpretation of 1. sams living situation 2. the night where darling lion and darling fosco kidnap her,3. why there are so many murderers around ( are they the escaped darlings)
There’s some really interesting discussion going on in here!
Let me throw this into the mix. Assuming Jonah is not real maybe he represents her desire to be cured of her mental illness? He’s medicated and almost seems kind of dull at some points but he’s constantly writing, a thing that she wants to be able to do, and he’s pretty well-adjusted socially if not weird. Sometimes he’s uncomfortably candid about his own struggles with mental health, like his addiction, which is the opposite of Samantha who is not able to talk about her breakdown. He almost reads like a pros and cons list on getting psychological help
Pros: I’ll feel better. I’ll write more. I’ll be more positive.
Cons: I’ll have to take medication that might make me lose my spark. People will pity me. smiling for no reason makes people look stupid.
Plus he literally offers her something to calm down at the holiday party. IDK I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on this.
So many of this and many of the follow up comments, especially those about DID, questioning Johah’s existence with the last few sentences of the book, etc.
After the Goodreads reviews/comments, I really started questioning my own interpretation and thought I was maybe looking for a larger meaning, when the book should just be taken as is.
But then I kept going back to all of those lines about Samantha’s imagination and fantasizing. And Ava was a swan. And those lines about or to Jonah at the end!!
I am so glad I found this to help validate some of my thoughts!!! Right, wrong, or otherwise, at least I know there are other people who read it through the same lens.
I’m so late to this post but, my gawd…. I just finished this book… literally just finished it and came to see others interpretations of Sam’s mental health and plot perspectives. With all these new insights I’m going to start it over again. What a wild ride this book is! Thanks all.
Were the bunnies really injured at the end of the book and if so, how did they get hurt?
I think for the heart of the book to work Jonah has to be real, we’ve followed Samantha looking for a friend wanting one so desperately she created one out of her loneliness and shame. Then at the end on the same bench Jonah joins her, Jonah who is weird and imperfect wants to be her friend. Not for what she can do for him like the bunnies, and not because she made him for only that purpose, he just wants to be her friend which is what she has needed and wished for all along. They’re both broken but together they can heal.
Did the final paragraphs make anyone else cry?
It’s all a metaphor for writing, the creative process, and imagination.
Eleanor’s clique is smart but they lack the imagination required to create lasting stories (symbolized by hybrids) that are original and can stand on their own. Samantha does so without even trying.
>!Caroline, Kira, Victoria, and Eleanor can transform bunnies (specifically that animal and no other) into human-ish men, called hybrids. Their abilities are limited because they do not possess much depth of imagination. The hybrids are imperfect and do not have much free will. The hybrids are mostly shallow copies of characters from the books the girls have read. Because of their sheltered upbringings, the girls have lived vicariously through literature.
The metaphorical connection is that most of the cliques’ stories lack depth and are derivative, even though they are written beautifully and are aesthetically pleasing.
Along comes Samantha. Samantha lived a troubled early life, experiencing poverty and the death of her mother, and was forced to develop her imagination much further than her classmates. Samantha is not conscious of her creative powers. That Frankenstein-esque creative “workshop” the other girls do? Samantha has done it before, unconsciously–accidentally. While sitting by a lake, after being rejected by her professor, she sees a swan. Fixating on her loneliness and insecurity, she transforms the swan into the epitome of strength, confidence, and “fuck it” mentality: Ava. Ava is, like the other girls’ hybrids, actually a creation of Samantha’s imagination, transformed into a human body.
The metaphorical connection: Samantha is a practiced, talented, imaginative writer. Her stories take on a life of their own, and she is capable of creative complexity in a way her peers are not.
When Eleanor/the Duchess meets Ava, she asks her “What pets did you have growing up?” This causes Ava to disappear very quickly—because Ava is not a real person with a true childhood. Eleanor is smart, but not imaginative. She recognizes Ava as a hybrid immediately, and asks her a question to prove that she is a hybrid.
That same day, Eleanor asks Samantha to join her in their writing workshop, because she knows that Samantha is capable of creativity in a way she is not. Instead of doing what the clique asks, Samantha accidentally transforms a stag in the yard into a hybrid. The girls meet the hybrid, and immediately all call him “ours.”
This comments on plagiarism. Unimaginative peers taking credit for something that is not theirs.
The Stag loves to fuck with people, just like Samantha’s other hybrid, just like Samantha’s stories. Samantha uses a lot of shock value, and “meanness,” as her peers would say. The Stag hybrid is even more complex and nuanced than Ava, and is also more vindictive. It actively seeks out the clique, and convinces them to sabotage their stories. The metaphorical connection: The girls’ attempt to plagiarize from Samantha’s work backfires, as their attempt to recreate her work is shallow.
I believe that the girls (Eleanor/Kira/Victoria/Caroline) can only make bunnies into bodies because the girls’ creativity relies on cuteness. They are attracted to, and believe in, only sunshine and aesthetics in their art. This is a metaphor for the shallow nature of their writing, the cutesy, gimmicky ways they perform and create. Samantha, on the other hand, is attracted to confidence, darkness, and power, and draws inspiration from animals that represent these aspects of herself.<!
Again, it’s all a metaphor for writing. The way writers draw inspiration, the way their life informs their art. The way writing can take on a living presence, can effect writers physically and mentally. And of course, plagiarism, imposter’s syndrome, and the shallow world of MFA programs that include the technically skilled but imaginatively inept.
I really dislike the schizophrenic interpretation. I remember someone leaving a bad review of the book, going on about how it was a bad representation of schizophrenia, and I was legitimately surprised and annoyed because nothing about the story made me think Sam was schizophrenic.
I can see how someone could make that interpretation, but I don’t think it’s supported by the text. I think there are definitely themes about the creative process, the artist creating something to fill a void in their life or as a reaction, the process of “killing your darlings.”
Also, I just think the story is actually so much more interesting to take literally verses a schizophrenic hallucination.
I don’t care for Goodreads reviews. Bunch of idiots.
Not sure if anyone is still following this-
my question is about the part where Sam returned to the school to have a “talk“ with the Lion. Then it seemed like she saw shadows of people that resembled Ursula and Lion and got tied up? What was this part about???
I just finished Bunny. I couldn’t put it down. Some things that I’m wondering about – when Samantha describes the night with the “Lion” in more detail, if it’s real, did he assault her? Did it push her over the edge? I found myself wondering if the bunnies were parts of herself (her psyche). I had fun with different theories. And found myself not really caring ultimately what the author intended because I just enjoyed reading it so much! I just fell into the fever dream
(I realized I used my partner’s account for my first ever real commen, so here it is again) I have just come half way through the book (max appeared on the bus stop- I didn’t know his name until reading your post)and I was contemplating dropping it. It started to make no sense at all and I felt like if I was not gonna get any answers (’cause I need some at least ) . But after reading your post (’cause I don’t care for spoilers, Master of Arts here) I regret leaving the book at home today. The plot is so annoyingly cryptic until at least halfway through that I felt like I might explode myself. So I thank you for your service.
I finished bunny over the summer and I am STILL thinking about it. I am still trying to piece together the ending and really hoping that Jonah was real
I don’t know if anyone has said this already.
But has anyone else noticed the forest theme through out?
Hear me out! What if this whole world is conjured up in someone’s imaginative mind and they are actually lost in the forest.
The bunnies, the stag, the forest smells, the swan, the grass smells, the mud the burnt or burning wood.
Maybe she’s somewhere completely different and writing all of this while imagining she’s somewhere else?
I bought my copy used, and the ‘last’ page was loose from the book (page 368). I’m wondering if I’m missing pages and didn’t receive the full book? Last sentence on the page is, “Where I buried her.” Can anyone help confirm if this is the end?