A mother with Parkinson’s, Elena, believes her daughter did not commit suicide and embarks on a physical and mental arduous journey to come to a central truth. It is a novel that starts small and ends large; from the alleged suicide of her daughter to a harrowing journey that, because it is internal and intersectional, becomes something about multiple systemic and insidious ways in which society removes agency from women and those not performing to puritanical standards.

It very much has no concern with genre expectations, as most literary intersections tend to be. My largest issue is with the formatting, though. I think it’s supposed to reflect, somewhat, the mental state of the protagonist, but it doesn’t actually seem formatted as such. Coupled with a necessary much retreading of ground to more effectively hit on memory issues Elena has, it creates an effect that constantly excises the reader from the text. Perhaps the formatting is supposed to be random, but because it’s walls and walls of text I spent my time looking for an answer and never found a satisfactory one.

However, it’s certainly novel and interesting, and has very human, well-rendered characters—primarily featuring women. None feel archetypical and the plot also has that quality. I liked it quite a bit… after I just rolled with the unusual dense prose that I couldn’t understand the reason for.

A highly Academic comedy in which the caricatures of a hedonistic most literal of all Zionists is invited to interview at a backwoods school for a history position, and the only Jew Americanist is required to subject himself (by way of cajoling from the institution) to being on the committee reviewing the application, as well as the actual hosting of the ideologically opposed, perhaps soon-to-be colleague.

While most of the humour comes from the conception—at least for me—it does dip into absurdism. Predominately to accentuate how even in the 1950s campus life had similar polarization of politics and how revisionists were well and truly spotted back then. Given what we now know about the now normalized, once actually absurd revisionist movement the absurd individual that is the Netanyahus absolutely are, pioneering the Israeli state—the fact that this anecdote from Harold Bloom’s life is itself undergone revisionist history in the form of this book, revising the father of revisionism while also subtly (most of the time) showing the do-nothing attitudes leading to that end goal as forgone, but also the anti-semitism steeped in that movement aimed at any Jewish peoples against the movement, is really pretty deft. And where the humour primarily stems from.

Now, this said, there’s also just wild events that occur to make it clear that no character is depicted fairly remotely to reality, other than their ideology. There’s no slip-sliding on that front. That makes it particularly biting while retaining the low brow wit that breaks tension. Heck, even whether or not a particularly funny sex scene takes place is answered with a plumb, if you infer, in the credits and more credits section.

Had I been more into the text. By that I mean, educated on the subjects it speaks intelligently about, I think I’d probably have gotten much more out of it. But the strength of the writing propelled me anyway. And there is, quite literally, a history lesson. The prose do weaken somewhat when it shifts to the framing of the actual arrival of the Netanyahus though. Our man is less razor sharp and playful with diction, which was the primarily enjoyment until I skated to what made this piece funny at a structural, conceptual level.

Especially because the formatting is fairly academic as well: Thick, meaty paragraphs that can go on for pages glide much faster in the first third of the book. The more granular it gets with history, and you have to really hunker down to internalize it, it does creep to a crawl. Will not be to everyone’s taste.

In that way it might be a deft slight of hand, shifting to that. But I think I’d prefer have had the voice maintain throughout. Combined with the niche quality of the high brow humour, it’s probably not got much of a chance to blow me away. Even to a layman, however, very enjoyable.

This book gets more interesting for me the more I think on it. The ending is abrupt and initially unsatisfying, denying catharsis and is very prescriptive. But the more you interrogate it as a reader it becomes multifaceted.

A campus novel more concerned with creating the whirlwind rhythm of firsts. Friends, classes, ostensible crush or love or infatuations—paired with a writing style that focuses on descriptions of events, rarely granting much interiority or reflection, or sometimes even emotion. It then morphs into the first time away from that experience but rooted in a time and place similarly other, fish-out-water, communicatively dissociative. To give some further grounding to the fiction, I really enjoyed the “word ecosystem” created here—which feels very millennial to me—in which Selin consumes various media and books and reflects on them, which characterizes her, by proxy. And it also builds a shared consciousness with the reader where so much is missing in the description and granularity of the actual campus and other locations, but the associations Selin makes grow and add to the tone and atmosphere and the philosophy and psychology of Selin. Even as the character herself completely elides that this has happened across the entirety of the novel.

Wildly humorous to me at times, particularly around the arrangement of how something happens, rather than the event itself. Unafraid of poking fun at the protagonist, Selin, who fairly careens from life events to the next in a dream-like stupor, almost. It provokes the reader into a response and subjective reading, which isn’t typically how I like my fiction. The more context the better. But in this case it works well to convey the atmosphere and malleability of young Selin, who sometimes didn’t make sense to me at all. Only the changes in her opacity as a character somehow did define her by the end of it, especially when there’s stark contrasts. Simultaneously flighty prose that make the flow excellent, and the subject matter almost frivolous, become much more dense when you have to insert the context and the general meaning when your finished concludes.

Certainly unlike anything I’ve read. Completely subversive of genre expectations. Highly enjoyable and with a singular kind of humour. Possibly because of the subjectivity it’s hard to have a ”this-all-came-together” moment, because it’s almost self-generated value and therefor incredibly difficult to evaluate, even a day later and having slept on it and talked with my friend who read it with me, and without whom I would have struggled to take away meaning from certain moments. Sometimes we took away opposite meanings, even. Which I think is part of the charm and intention here. Even as I talk about it and think on it, a 4 out of 5 seems weak, yet I can’t justify a 5 because of the liminal space it straddles.

This was at once charming and disarming. Steeped in old Parisian culture and style and music, our unusual omniscient narrator tells the story of Georges Gerfaut, a businessman who ends up being hunted by two hitman for unknown reasons following a brief slice-of-life section preceded by tracking shots from the future of a man and his dog brutally killed (heads up for those who don’t like animal violence), and our man Gerfaut rocketing along a highway in a Mercedes.

Very much a sort of mash-up of Cohen brothers and Tarantino but vividly, sensuously French. Street names and travel itineraries and food and clothes all build around a French ecosystem; strangeness and things entirely apart from the everyday, very English. It somehow works. Half the fun is being placed in that time period with great description of absolutely everything. It even tends to shirk colour, making it feel like a noir black and white film most of the time, for me. It initially put me off, vacillating between the comical and the hard-boiled—but the narrator pulls it off with the unusual perspective and closing chapter.

It also helps it’s quite short and punchy; staccato sentences and matter-of-fact prose style feel reminiscent of Hemingway, albeit decidedly, purposefully off-of-center with dialogue, the only real consistent weakness of the book. I do think it’s there for a point though. It knows it’s built a character and a gonzo hybrid thing encapsulating a moment in time. I imagine it’s so odd it’ll put some people off. A 4.5 rounded up, because I really do think it’s unique and interesting in lasting ways.

This is most definitely a decolonizing work. It doesn’t really accept any notion of a (western) novel. I’m not sure it’s either character or plot driven. The vernacular is purposefully English mixed with other (colonized?) languages. It’s intuitive to read but does always telegraph the Other nature of the text.

What if Aztecs weren’t colonized? What if They were the colonizers? We follow a older warrior sent to the battle of Stalingrad in a reimagined 1942. Hunting Nazis… to enslave them and ritualistically sacrifice them.

Simultaneously, a man in what appears to be “our” reality works at a meatpacking place. Diminutive and diminished, dwelling in the consumerism; ruled by a small man wielding the small power he has, both Aztecs exist. Plaguing and bleeding into one anothers’ thoughts, each are haunted by the other. What goes around comes around. There are a lot of universes slipping and sliding.

There aren’t traditional paragraph structures or formatting, which only increase the confusion and the bleed, or shifts in reality, where something both different and the same is occurring. A dream where a slaver is given a scar becomes true in another. Untimely deaths occurs, then doesn’t. Things become easily to consume, then difficult. Mostly difficult; since the paragraphs generally are almost like chapters, scenes framed and ending, going on for pages and pages. But there is good flow, strangely enough. The eye doesn’t skip along, it’s mostly just crunching the text without a break, and rolling with it when reality shifts.

I think that’s part of the decolonizing properties imbued in the text. It’s not supposed to be easy subject matter to consume. Neither does it say everyone benefits from the alt history of Aztec conquerors thriving. It does show very clearly what is robbed from a people who are, though. Their spirit and language and culture tramped down, at the same time as their history and imagination allowing them to be sliced by the double edge sword of true history and what might have been. There is a humanity lost. The gregarious and funny, vulgar, and different perspective (especially from normalized character voice and language, etc.) is, quite literally, lost. It reminded me a bit of Slaughterhouse Five, when it’s at its best. Only… tackling something much more heady.

https://medium.com/springboard-thought/why-you-should-read-small-game-hunting-at-the-local-coward-gun-club-62eee8e927db

“Her loving him and him being well don’t seem to get on at all… And now they would get nothing but ruination.”

I do not think it is an understatement that of all the books I have read pertaining to Canadian culture, Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is the most important. It is a slap in the face we all of us deserve.

“Smile. Smile for your money. Or starve.”

Within the general consciousness, there are certain understood exclusions for Canadians.
While all societies organized around patriarchy have a pervasive rape culture (and numerous issues around toxic masculinity), Canadians, in particular, do not admit there is anything nefarious about our country. Pick a pervasive cultural problem. We’re actually doing better than everyone else; I guarantee it. And we like to keep our dirty laundry indoors, thank you very much, as opposed to the other places that hang them out for all to see. Gross. Can’t they keep things in-house?

One of the problems with this is that our boys grow up in a world where they simultaneously know rape culture exists but are also removed from it. They’re in a protective bubble. This problem — actually all societal problems, really — are not inherently Canadian, and so we hold ourselves above them. That is mostly America, isn’t it? That doesn’t happen here. Or if it does, certainly not as much. We are well more along in dealing with it then they are, at least.

“She has learned to abuse herself in a misguided attempt at thwarting expectation.”

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club disabuses readers of this.

Billed as “Blistering Newfoundland Gothic for the 21st century,” the ways in which the majority of boys are enabled and educated by our culture to perpetually prioritize their needs while viewing women as creatures to be conquered and colonized take center stage.

Not boys, in general, specifically Canadian boys from Newfoundland. No looking away this time; sorry! Obfuscation is not an option. It just isn’t. There is not even cloud cover to take shelter from here, I’m afraid.

Jumping from past to present the actions of men — from microaggressions and manipulations to rape — to women, are examined and splayed out before everyone such that no reader can look away.

While the majority of the story is on Iris, a young waitress at a faux upscale restaurant, the narrative jumps around quite often to others in the community. First as an introduction. Then as a way of illustrating how everything ties together in terms of the actual events that take place, but also as a way of communicating the complicity of a community and the role each person plays in a toxic culture.

“Her body was built for fucking but her heart was not. It was built for that other thing that eludes her. This was perhaps the great tragedy of her person. Her external structure does not elicit the desired internal response in men.”

The writing is suffused with indignation that is equal parts scathing and insightful, at times very reminiscent of the prose of McCarthy, specifically those found in Blood Meridian. Clearly Megan Gail Coles writes how she wants to write. She alters the typical structure of the book, discarding quotations and typical punctuation, then buries herself in the minds of characters and wills it all out. There is nothing quite like this out there.

“Just joking with ya, b’y.
He said this readily in an unmistakable smirking way. But everyone knew he was never just joking. Not even a little bit joking. The claim provided him cover to make asinine remarks at everyone. He cloaked himself in a facade sense of humour cape, draped it over his own shoulders and across his face with every barb he sent into the world. If shots were not met with uncomfortable laughter, Rog advised any human hurt to get a sense of humour. Like his. This was just another coded way of saying once again that the hurt man, any hurt man, was like a woman.
Blow that whistle he did.
Our jokester felt certain being like a woman was the worst way to be and slandered them all female.”

It is as though she can walk up to a person and see or hear their innermost thoughts and transcribe them without any thoughts of comfort. It is, at times, completely terrifying how exacting she can verbalize and see the shame and confusion and doubt and pain of a person.

While the story itself is about Iris going to pick up her paycheque on Valentine's Day from the restaurant but instead gets roped into working with her boss, who she is carrying on an affair with, and his wife. When a snowstorm hits, nature brings out uncomfortable truths; and fallout ensues, of course.

“…He continued to share his trauma around like orange slices. One for you. One for you. One for me. In this way he still retained the entire piece of fruit harboured inside bodies he inhabited.”
But more than that, privilege itself is addressed; covering white men, gay men, white women, indigenous women, and more. And poverty — a major issue in the Maritimes — cleverly ties together all of these seemingly loose threads.

By the end, you will be convinced that Megan Gail Coles has your number. Not only does she convey the cultural landscape of Newfoundland, but also realizes each of these people so completely they feel unique and vibrant, but also, somehow, they are stand-ins for people you have met before, or now know.

“Stay alive long enough to buy new jeans…
That’s what the economy wanted. Not for him to thrive. Find some kind of peace. Or gather up a fistful of happiness. It was not in the market’s interest to keep him alive for the right reasons. And his human worth was sold back to him as such.”

The style of writing is something else. It adapts to each character with alternate colloquialisms, spelling errors, and inflections. Within these unique voices she just now has humanized and made you empathize with, the author begins to unfold in excruciating detail and precision, just how sociopathic our society is. The things they do are given secret captions for the reader, telegraphing why they treat each other how they do.

Actually, you know these things she’s saying already; you just never actually say them and probably try to push them from your mind altogether when you can.

“But knowing something and facing it is altogether different.”
And that’s the point, of course!

They are people who mess up and try and fail and don’t even try to hurt people sometimes — but they are also appendages of society performing their preprogrammed function.

Pulling off the monumental, this outright condemnation of our way of life manages to be surprisingly humanizing and thoughtful and caring, even as it spares absolutely no one. It is a magnum opus on trauma and harm and love, and refuses to neither scapegoat nor give permission to any character to treat each other the way they do.

“John would cry atop her womb when she attempted autonomy of thought.”

It is a profoundly good work, the truest sense of the word.

And it is exactly what Canada needs to hear right now.

Canadians for too long have patted ourselves on the back for being better than anyone else, certainly America, citing various statistics regurgitated by ad campaigns from former elections and governmental administrations. Patently false claims we use to bolster ourselves and place us apart.
The truth is Canada participates in society. Has a lot of self-examining to do, responsibility to claim. While it takes place in Newfoundland, this could be anywhere in Canada, really.

The marginalized find no shelter here. No safety. This book rips away the illusion we’ve come to prefer. A misdirection that has lasted far too long.

You should read Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.
You’re in it.

“Hard to say who is most or worst hurt when you treat people like nothing.
The fallout is catastrophic.”

This review is also on medium. Toss me a follow and some claps if you read it there, and like it!
https://medium.com/springboard-thought/making-sense-of-bunny-b4c20e02289d

“We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.”

Books that defy categorization almost always end up staying with me.

They force you to examine them, rather than stuff them in a box and close the lid on them tidily and complete. No book is emblematic of this for me than Bunny. I have never tried to figure out what the hell was going on in a book before. And for some reason that is incredibly enticing to me. It’s a different kind of challenge than most books, and it doesn’t hurt that Bunny is incredibly well written. It was nothing but a joy to puzzle through.

Samantha Heather Mackey is a lonely, isolated, insular, imaginative student in a Master-of-Fine Arts program in the fictional college of Warren. Samantha tends to dwell primarily in the written word, viewing others and her surroundings in terms of literary tropes, devices, and structure. The entire story essentially is an uncanny pastiche of her actual college experiences and her final, fictional thesis project.

‘…“I’ve never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another. Until I came here. Sometimes it’s good to take a break, the Lion said to me last January, whisking his tea. Focus on other things. Read. Be a guest in other worlds. Perhaps you’re growing. Evolving. Trust, Samantha. Patience.”’

Bunny is a very subjective experience. I love that about it. I don’t think there’s any real ‘correct’ answer as to what actually happened and what was pure fiction. But it’s fun to try and make sense of it by writing about it. I don’t want to go over everything at a granular level. Just the story in broad terms. I even ignore a character altogether for the purposes of expediency.

Major Spoilers Ahead!

“I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. I pull it out, thinking it’s her. She’s saying, Come back. She’s saying she didn’t mean it. Instead, on the screen is a text from a number I vaguely recognize. Words flanked by tulips and open-armed ghosts. U coming 2nite? :D”

Things start to really get going when Samantha is invited into her fellow MFA students' private lives even as she drifts from her only friend, Ava: A queer-coded art student dropout with whom Samantha grounded herself in reality. This also placed an inordinate amount of her mental health (and unexamined feelings) onto her sole friend. In a moment of vulnerability and emotional distress at her falling out with Ava, Samantha goes down the rabbit hole. This particular stressor prompts her to cope with what happens next by recontextualizing events and interactions the same way she’s been prone to do since childhood: fictionalizing her experiences.

These MFA girls she ends up spending time with, dubbed ‘The Bunnies’, behave as a unit and have some similarities to a cult (which they are frequently likened to). Samantha certainly loses herself in some ways — trading autonomy for a sense of belonging—but it feels like from Samantha’s perspective every group is a cult; at least in so far as cliques in the college go. Which, honestly, feels pretty on point for a lot of the social structures we participate in on a daily basis. Social media. Cult-of-personalities. At a human pack dynamics level, it’s not far off, just a bit hyperbolic in this particular context.

The observer effect of Samantha’s gaze transforms those denizens of Warren college that she doesn’t trust into animals, revealing their ‘true’ nature.

‘She raises a hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says. My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my mouth, even though no sound comes out. Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.”’

As the bunnies reveal they have created a ritual, the process of which they call “drafting”, which creates men which are, more-or-less, toys to play with. Drafting seemingly imbues solely the characteristics and aspects of the creators' imagination, revealing these men to be one-dimensional, pop-culture caricatures of the ideal man — which, ironically — renders them unable to perform typical male gender roles altogether. The men speak in regurgitated literary tropes and can’t think for themselves or have sex; can’t even contemplate sex initiated by a woman and don’t initiate it themselves. The mere mention of sex actually makes them break down and cry and visibly shake in a corner.

Though completely unsatisfying, the bunnies continue to create them, believing that they need to simply try harder; again and again, continuing and trusting in what they refer to as ‘the work’.
Eventually, something non-derivative and brilliant will come of it. They have no doubt. Won’t even tolerate doubt, in fact.

This is the literalization of the — or a — writing process. It brings to mind the famous quote by Hemmingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” Only in this process, the male bunnies become a kind of sustenance for them all, too, transcending even a literal interpretation of the process being a blood sacrifice in order to write well.

Likely, Samantha lets herself be subsumed by the group in a kind of madness of crowds mentality and begins to participate in the writing process with her colleagues. Writing fiction and collaborating while drinking. Her hangover is (again) made literal when she wakes up feeling horrible after experiencing the horrific: a male bunny having exploded when she attempted to engage him in conversation. The character as written did not hold up under scrutiny.

Importantly, Samantha has not actually ‘drafted’ herself, as yet. But she begins spending all her time with the group and becomes a bunny herself. She changes everything about herself to conform to the stereotypical feminine archetype she had so loathed about the bunnies before she knew them.

Then, out of nowhere, Ava returns and rescues Samantha from the perceived clutches of the nefarious cult. Suspicious, considering Ava has said she was running away with a man, which caused Samantha to run away to find solace with the bunnies in the first place. At the time, from Samantha’s perspective, Ava seemed not to care about Samantha at all; yet from Ava’s, she now tells Samantha that she had run away from her “no reason at all”. Ava claims she was so worried about Samantha after that evening that those plans to leave were scrapped. She has been looking everywhere for Samantha for days and days and days, and finally found her now roaming about with the bunnies.

But… Ava is gone. It’s sad but true. If not in this moment, certainly shortly after it, when the bunnies find them both in a diner and the dutchess, the leader of the bunnies, speaks to Ava alone, and Ava walks away from Samantha and out of her life, for good.

But before Samantha resigns herself to the bunnies yet again, on the cusp of walking into the ritual space, the rich suburban house of the bunnies, an omen appears to her in the form of a stag.

“I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.”

When it comes time for Samantha to do the drafting ritual in the presence (and judgment) of the bunnies, she finds herself unable to engage in the process, which is characterized by the bunnies expressing their disappointment in a weird, sexual performance vernacular, suggesting that this process of writing is conflated by Samantha.

“You want to fuck, not be fucked,” Victoria says. “Samantha,” Eleanor intones, “is this making sense?” I stare at them all through Kira’s pink heart-shaped glasses. This is how she must see the world all the time. I look at their dark pink faces, so suddenly grave. I should call the police. I should run to Mexico. “Totally.”

After all, bunnies fuck, right? Why can’t Samantha just ‘get it up’ and perform her gender role as the oversexualized, feminine bunny unit often does and, in turn, expects?

Perhaps ‘the ritual’ is heavily influenced by the men the girls would hook up with or date on campus. The inputs of time and effort the girls fed into them would reveal that they aren’t satisfying subjects/objects that meet the bunnies’ needs and are discarded. They then show up in their writing. Or perhaps it’s entirely fictional characters being written, consumed, discarded. Because the experience is such a blur it’s hard to say. I think, in the end, it’s probably a mix of both. Derivative men both on and off the page — and Samantha being stymied in terms of having no male counterpart as well as not being able to write.

As a result of the bunnies' thinly-veiled condescension and judgment, Samantha feels isolated from the group once again and returns to her home. Thrusting herself wholesale into her thesis project.

“I miss you, Bunny. This summer was so hard without you. I barely wrote a word, I was so, so sad. Let’s never ever part again, please?” Ava laughs out loud at this. Actually laughs. Throws her feathery head back. Doesn’t bother to cover her mouth with her gloved hand. It’s a delicious, raucous sound. Ringing in the air like the evening’s missing music.”

What Samantha discovers at home away from the bunnies can safely be assumed to be the constructs of her thesis: Ava returns again — but is actually a swan; and a boy she knows she has created in her ‘failed’ attempt at drafting, the stag — who is actually the embodiment of the masculine characteristics she needs to defend herself, cultivate autonomy, and remove the emotional threat of the bunnies. These two creatures, the swan and the stag are in love. And, bitingly, as Ava puts it: because she’s a grown woman and not a child, they are, of course, fucking.
Both characters are playing out a fantasy of Samantha’s. She is able to have the kind of relationship she wanted to have with Ava but hadn’t realized until too late, and simultaneously, also hurt the bunnies. There is room for the stag to be the guy Ava ran away with and they just stayed behind.

But I think it is far more likely Ava has been out of the picture and the stag is Samantha. Both often know what Samantha is thinking and engage in a dialogue with her when she’s not actually spoken aloud. And when Samantha is doing something, either may mirror what she’s doing. She seems to be in a dissociative state and this is where the thesis begins in earnest.

“Because you simply can’t sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal man of your own creation and say nothing. You can’t. And say nothing? That would be just wrong, on so many levels.”

After a fight with Ava, Samantha runs away again but intuitively believes something is wrong at home and rushes back. The stag is clutching a dead Ava, revealed to be a swan, an ax buried in her back. Samantha immediately blames the stag (herself) for this but then transfers that anger onto one of the bunnies because, during the drafting process previously, one of the bunnies quoted Kafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.”

In a final confrontation, the stag prowls to the bunnies with Samantha in tow, seemingly completely helpless to do anything but follow. But when talking to the bunnies she is completely powerless to take action herself, even though it is clear they did it.
But her creation is not powerless.

When the stag makes his presence known, the girls push and pull at the stag, each trying to selfishly be the one to possess him for themselves. Though the stag seems amused but otherwise completely indifferent and unaffected, he calls on Samantha to use an ax and split open his human form. A majestic stag breaks out from the shell and bristles — shattering the girls and throwing them to the ground; finally achieving an act of domination for Samantha.

Afterwhich, at graduation, the bunnies sit apart from Samantha with her professor and award her grudging respect. They appear beaten, bruised and broken both from the ‘physical confrontation’ at the house, where they were tossed to the ground, but also appear to have permanent injuries from self-harm. The professor reflects on the damage this year, likening it to a kind of war that they’ve all gotten through. Soothing platitudes are exchanged. And the college experience comes to an end. And this is to say nothing of a few subplots and two characters altogether which further enrich the story.

Bunny is anything but a typical reading experience. It is a brilliant amalgamation and study of how cultural consciousness views the college experience, gender roles, sexual coming-of-age, the horror of losing agency and autonomy, and just generally being the kid that is left of center in a heavily tribalistic, non-sensical world.

“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?”, my mother always asked me. “I don’t know”, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”

An incredible collection. I love her writing. Hadn’t read anything of hers until now. I found it incredibly insightful, thought provoking, and witty. The topics wide ranging.

Clever, witty, truly satirical. An absolute pleasure.