If you’ve never heard of Mona Awad, I need you to stop what you’re doing and pay attention, because I’m about to send you down a rabbit hole you will not regret.

I’ve only read three of Mona Awad’s works, and all three can be classified as dark academia my favourite genre. Canadian author Mona Awad has quite theimagination. She writes novels that read like fevered dreams, especially for those of us who have a history of viewing ourselves as insecure, anxious, and at times with self-doubt.

My first experience with Awad was her novel All’s Well.  Honestly, I bought,this novel, because I thought the cover was beautiful, and because it was a reference to Shakespeare’s play. Miranda Fitch is a college drama teacher who is bound and determined to produce Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, mostly because she wants to relive a time in her life when she was at the height of her acting career, playing the lead role of Helen. Her students, however, are equally bound and determined to perform Macbeth — a play that Miranda holds directly responsible for her debilitating chronic pain. When she meets three strange men at a bar (men who symbolize the three witches of Macbeth) Miranda engages in the most bizarre conversations. Soon after, the physical and emotional pain she carries begins to transfer onto the people she dislikes, and Miranda starts to feel a dark, intoxicating sense of power  at the expense of others.

Now, Bunny.  Bunny is the most wild of novels. Samantha McKey is part of a creative writing cohort at an Ivy League university. The entire story is told from her point of view, but we glean through her narrative (and she is an extremely unreliable narrator) that she is a loner. She views herself as superior to the others in her cohort, referring to them as “the Bunnies.” Soon, however, she is invited to join the Bunnies’ “Smut Salon” — a gathering where they meet to discuss their work. But the Smut Salon goes far beyond discussion. Soon the Bunnies are kidnapping, killing, and conducting all sorts of experiments to create. There are hints woven throughout that Samantha may be mentally ill, and that the world of the Bunnies and the Smut Salon is entirely a creation of her own mind.

​​The sequel to “Bunny:”  “We Love You, Bunny,” made me rethink every interpretation of “Bunny” I ever had. It’s written from the various points of view of the Bunnies themselves …they  finally  get to tell their side of the story. It seems Samantha, our protagonist and narrator from “Bunny”  has written a bestselling novel about, of all things, the Bunnies themselves. And they are not happy. Why? because they are not exactly written in the most flattering light. They kidnap Samantha and tie her up in the same attic where they once held their Smut Salon and conducted their gruesome creative experiments. In fact, the axe is still there — and it’s often picked up like a talking stick by the various narrators.

Where Bunny felt to me like a story about identity, creativity, and what one will sacrifice in order to create both an identity and a piece of art, We Love You, Bunny is more about on the creative process itself. It presents such questions as who owns a piece of art, what constitutes plagiarism, and what makes a creative work credible. Both novels, I believe, require a second reading and a long conversation in order to peel back all the layers

:Mona Awad is not for everyone but if you are someone who loves stories that blur the line between reality and imagination, that make you question everything you think you know about a character, and that stay with you long after you’ve closed the book she just might be exactly for you. I would love to know if any of you have read her work, and what you thought. As always, happy reading.