That’s Not All, Folks

Most people look for home in a place or a person. For Samantha Heather Mackey — the brilliant but depressed twenty-five-year-old who narrates Mona Awad’s Bunny — home is her imagination. Her mother is dead, and her father is a con artist who has been in hiding for years. To cope, she comes up with “horrific and fantastic” stories. Her lively inner world has earned her a scholarship to attend a graduate writing program at Warren University, a fictional Ivy League school in New England.

She quickly becomes the object of envy and ridicule in her prestigious cohort, which is a pack of wealthy, pastel-clad girls who call each other “Bunny” and move through campus like a single organism. The four of them — Sam calls them Kira, Caroline, Victoria, and Eleanor in this volume — coo over vintage typewriters, braid each other’s hair, and speak in unison. They frequent a café that serves everything in miniature: “Mini sodas. Mini burgers. Mini poutines. Mini cupcakes.�...