I want to beat up Mona Awad for doing this to me AGAIN, why must she consistently have decent ideas that are pulled off in the most asinine, long-winded and pretentious ways? I genuinely think that she's going on my 'do not read' pile. What the absolute hell and not in a GOOD way. There are bits that I very much enjoyed but it was absolutely overwhelmed by all the terrible parts of this book that sucked the fun right out of it. My take aways from this was:
I could have just watched Heathers or Mean Girls with a few episodes of Daria in between to break it up.
I am going to fight Mona Awad.
That restaurant was absolutely the same restaurant from that Rick & Morty gag.
This isn't even a "woah buddy!!! what a weird book this was!!! A lil too weird for me!!!" I adore weird books - this was tryhard weird and bland. This is 'I'm not like other girls' to the max. AGGRESSIVELY millennial and trying desperately to scream "my characters are so totally different you guys!" While I don't think Samantha can reach the heights of my absolute least favourite MCs, she's in the top 10. Potentially 5 because I'm annoyed right now. This was overwhelmingly self-indulgent and pretentious. The only characters that I enjoyed were the Bunnies themselves and they were massively under-utilized. And...hear me out here: compared to the tropes that they're meant to mimic - I.e: Mean Girls/Heathers ... they're super benign and mostly just nice. Like... Samantha has a big fucking chip on her shoulder about them because they're rich, pretty...and hug each other? Bro, they asked you out for bento boxes and froyo before inducting you in their Bunny/homunculus project. WHICH THEY ONLY DID BECAUSE YOU DID IT YOURSELF FIRST WITHOUT KNOWING ABOUT IT AND THEY NOTICED. They didn't bully her or even do anything bad to anyone else??? I guess the Bunny Boys but they aren't even human or real. There was that whole rambling thing about the Lion and them seeing her in his car one night and he started distancing not long after that- boo hoo maybe you shouldn't be driving around with your teacher ANYWAY?
This was 5% interesting premise with the Bunnies and 95% writing wank and pity parties. SHE JUST DOES NOT STOP WAFFLING AND WHINING ABOUT NOTHING. The most painful parts of this book is when she is alone and doesn't have anyone to judge play off of. And it's oh so sad because she wants to belong and she has no home and her mom is dead and her dad ran away and she has no friends and she has writers block and she used to be rich but now she has no money and her teacher isn't talking to her after having a weird relationship with her wah wah wah wah wah. It figures that the other most insufferable character- Ava was a product of her self-aggrandizing brain. The twist itself is fine??? Like by the point it was revealed that she made Ava out of a swan I was basically at the point of.
I digress on my baby whining though - I guess it's interesting in a... meta way? Like the whole subtext of killing your darlings is an important skill to learn when writing? At one point Max was responding to the direct narration which I did rather like a bit. Samantha herself also completely dehumanizes the Bunnies by exclusively describing aspects of their bodies - i.e: Cupcake is Cupcake because of her colourful pastel dress sense and that she smells sweetly. I can't tell if the fact that the Bunnies themselves being unravelled by a man is meant to be subtextual or if it's just predictable writing so I'll leave that up in the air.