Review: We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad (Spoiler-Alert)

Devastated to report that the sequel to my favorite book is... bad.

DNF @66% I simply can't do it anymore.

Mona Awad's Bunny is perfect because it leaves so much up to interpretation. This prequel/sequel does its best to fill in those gaps, but I can't figure out why.

The novel opens from the perspective of the Bunnies, having just kidnapped and bound Sam while on her first book tour (for Bunny, which she has now canonically written). From there, we get the story from the perspective of each Bunny and then... their first creation.

On the surface, this is a fun idea. I enjoyed the quirks and experiments with form that each section presents, but the substance is simply lacking. We're rehashing plot points we already know about without revealing anything meaningful, plus filling in satisfyingly ambiguous aspects of the first novel with trite details.

While I can't fairly review the whole book having only read two thirds, there are a few elements that kept me trudging along for a while.

1. The comedy is still hilarious, though feels less smart. I laughed out loud at certain passages, but don't feel like they serve a grander purpose. While the first book is a clever satire, this one reads as one big SNL skit that only halfway meets the mark. That being said, Awad's word choice does really hit sometimes. "Discarded cafeteria foie gras" as a concept made me giggle. Also "randomly German" in the following excerpt:

Was there a reason for instance, that I was always capitalizing my Nouns? Was I German? Not even consistently German, but randomly German?

I did not respond. Allan knew, of course, that I was not randomly German.

Like how does she come up with this stuff.

2. I actually did enjoy the portion where the Bunnies desperately try to get Aerius to like them by forcing him to consume all their favorite media. That did feel meaningful to me—like it's so true that sometimes you feel like the media you consume defines you and if someone doesn't understand that, they can't understand your essence.

3. While the play with form is fun, it drags on too long. Using smiley faces as punctuation is a funny gimmick for like... 30 pages. Max. But tell me why Aerius' section is like 100 I swear.

I do have to give it credit for somehow delivering an equally shocking, "That's when Rob Valencia's head explodes," from the first book, with a newly almost as iconic, "And so down Ax came onto Allan ☺." (I also fully thought he was about to hook up with the frat guy before this, which I'm assuming is intentional from the author, so the second he decapitated him my brain said, 'so no head?' and I had to just sit with the fact that that was my natural reaction. Maybe this is a masterpiece after all).

All in all, this could have been a fun bonus novella or something but I don't enjoy it as a novel (at least the first two thirds). Luckily, it did not ruin the original Bunny for me in any way though, so I will need to re-read her at some point soon to cleanse my pallet.

~ Thank you so much to Simon Element (Simon & Schuster) and Marysue Rucci Books for an early copy in exchange for an honest review. All quotes are from an uncorrected proof and are subject to change. Release date: September 23, 2025 ~