book review: we love you, bunny by mona awad

hey, bunny! let’s sulk in sad girl MFA vibes for a bit together. i promise i won’t waste

your time. you wanna know what i think? one of the most challenging aspects of writing to achieve as a fiction author is the ability to immerse readers in your novel’s world. but mona awad has proven time and time again that she excels at this. she did it with bunny, and she did it again with we love you, bunny: a prequel‑sequel hybrid that’s equal parts eerie and magnetic.

can i be honest, though, bunny? i feel like the original plot was butchered by the bunnies’ retelling in this sequel. of course, the bunnies are only as powerful as their hivemind. that is, if they’re not fully aligned, not on the same wavelength, things become… discordant.

regardless, i know what awad’s goal with this approach was: four unreliable narrators looping the same story until we, the readers, decide what’s true. but what was once a plot grounded by sam’s voice becomes a mess of slight homoerotic tension between two bunnies, mommy issues bleeding into another bunny’s narrative, and a lot more noise than clarity. don’t get me wrong, i love reading something super surreal and asking myself, “wtf?” but sometimes i need something to keep me anchored, yanno?

where we love you, bunny redeems itself is aerius—the bunnies’ very first darling boy,

perfect in every way. his lusting for jonah and eventual betrayal of the bunnies and ursula

reminded me of the rawness of his creation—especially in the sensory, almost primitive way

awad writes his perspective. those passages are visceral and weirdly beautiful. still, his overall arc teases profundity without fully committing, which left me wanting, big time, bunny.

i also can’t shake the feeling that sam reads like awad’s selfinsert. it’s a bold move, but i

kept wondering where the satire ends and lived experience begins. especially with the bunnies shaming sam’s writing. i guess i just don’t love awad’s decision to make bunny autobiographical in this novel’s world, thereby acting as the exigence for the bunnies to retell the story at all.

i would have preferred the story from aerius’s perspective alone. then again, there are

some inconsistencies in his telling, too, that make me look at bunny and say, “huh…

interesting…” in my opinion, bunny could have easily been a standalone novel, so i don’t feel

like we love you, bunny was necessary, but i digress.

sometimes, it lands as sharp as the satire in its predecessor; other times, we love you,

bunny feels a little on the nose. overall: bunny was a solid four‑star read for me. on the other

hand, we love you, bunny scrapes by at three stars—and that’s generous, because i hate half stars. sorry, bunny, but you can’t fix what wasn’t already broken!

Edited by Joyce Kristine Culong