The Bunnies try to get Samantha to collaborate with them on a project that they variously describe as “experimental,” “performance based” and “so intertextual,” eventually settling on “a hybrid.” (“That most obscure of academic beasts,” Samantha thinks.
They’re also perfect foils for Awad’s satire of the preciousness and navel-gazing that sometimes accompany discourse about creative writing. They love-bomb Samantha one minute and tear her down the next, angering Ava, who hates their “little-girl cult.” The young women are scarily believable contradictions - they’re fans of both transgressive, experimental prose and Pinkberry frozen yogurt, literary riot grrrls with a cuddlecore aesthetic. With the Bunnies, Awad has created some of the most memorable antagonists in recent fiction. It doesn’t take long for things to get out of hand, and the novel culminates in a shocking and bizarre confrontation that you truly have to read to believe. The chapters that follow find Samantha in the thrall of the Bunnies, helping them conduct some truly alarming experiments involving (actual) bunnies, and eating lunch at a cutesy restaurant that only serves miniature foods. Without giving too much away, there’s a fake prom that ends with someone’s head exploding, which tends to put a damper on even the most well-organized formal dance. And that’s when things start to go wrong. The experience isn’t as bad as she feared and Samantha wonders whether she’s got her classmates all wrong.
Samantha’s morbid curiosity gets the best of her, and despite Ava’s wariness about the young women, she decides to show up. So she’s shocked when the Bunnies invite her to a “Smut Salon,” a mysterious gathering to be held at one of their houses. Samantha senses that her dislike of the Bunnies is mutual, noting how her workshop classmates “would look down at each story I submitted like it was a baby that just gave them the finger, and then side-eye each other for a long time.” The Bunnies’ performative friendship rankles Samantha to no end, and she complains about them to her best friend, Ava, a semi-Goth cynic who also can’t abide the stubbornly twee clique, and to Jonah, a sweet young poet and recovering alcoholic who has taken a shine to Samantha. … All four of their glossy mouths making squealing sounds of monstrous love that hurt my face.” The coterie of four young women have made an art form out of platonic and public displays of affection: “How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink-and-white bodies, forming a hot little circle of rib-crushing love and understanding it took my breath away. Samantha, a student in a creative writing graduate program at a prestigious New England university, finds her simpering classmates intolerable, and with good reason.
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