Summary: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Mona Awad author of Bunny, published June 11th by Viking. Mona is also author of the acclaimed 13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl. Her writing has appeared in Time, Vice, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s,The LA Times and other publications. Bunny gives us the story of Samantha, a student at a prestigious University where she is a graduate seeking her MFA. From that point on things begin to go awry, to say the least. Samantha begins to abandon her closest friend as she is drawn magnetically to a group of fellow students named bunnies, bunnies because they call themselves that. These bunnies have been described as “twee” by about a hundred publications. They are that—sugary sweet, treacly, fawning, and any other adjective you can come up which describes a bunch of women, who while adults, act like cliquey cheerleaders at a posh boarding school. But behind their glittering and “My Little Pony exteriors”, lurks a horror that evolves in a real and perhaps, slightly less real, way that forces the reader, delightedly to read on, generally in one sitting. Although I am a 67 year old white male that would probably sidle away from this work in my bookstore, I found myself as entranced as others will, notwithstanding the, sorry, chick lit title and premise of the book. The climax and denouement of Bunny is something I can’t talk about here, but trust me, you will be aghast, delighted, perhaps a bit confused (in a good way) when you close the book hoping for more. But dear reader, there will be more, as Bunny has been picked up by AMC as a TV series, in which Mona will be able to flesh out, as the screenwriter, some of the twists and turns of this remarkable work.
