Remember in Mean Girls, when Lindsay Lohan’s character starts hanging out with the, um, mean girls? Initially, she does it as a kind of social experiment to see how the other half lives. Soon though, she’s sucked into their world of Burn Books, sexy Santa suits and pink-clad Wednesdays.
That’s a very tame version of what happens in Mona Awad’s new novel, Bunny. Her second book (after 2016’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl) is about how women feel about themselves and others...told through the eyes of five somewhat deranged college students.
Bunny opens on the idyllic campus of Warren University in New England. There are the requisite jokes about how uppity everyone is, and there’s a girl who seems to fit the outsider trope nicely: Samantha Heather Mackey. A scholarship student at the school’s highly selective MFA program, she’s goth-lite: moody, brooding and almost entirely friendless.
Much of Samantha’s ire is directed at the “Bunnies,” a group of four sickeningly twee rich girls who wear babydoll dresses and eat miniature foods and call each other—you guessed it—Bunny.