Looking for something bonkers? Look no further than We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad. It’s both a prequel and a sequel to Awad’s breakout novel, Bunny (technically, it could standalone, but I reckon it would too weird if you hadn’t read Bunny).

The story opens with the Bunnies kidnapping Samantha, who has just published her first novel to critical acclaim (exposing the Bunnies and the highly selective writing workshop that they had all participated in). At the New England stop on Sam’s book tour, her one-time frenemies literally make her their captive audience, to tell their side of the story.

…Samantha’s a fucking asshole, and I do want her to fucking die, but then I thought: Why give her better book sales? Why go to jail for her when I don’t even like orange?

Awad has turned up the dial on the campus-satire – a true highlight if you’ve ever listened to an academic waffle on about their extremely narrow area of interest.

…yes, we know you made cheap fun of her admittedly unorthodox pedagogical gifts in your novel, Bunny. Her occultisms, her gynecological metaphors, her use of sock puppets, her deep love of what you called Trauma Porn.

Novels aren’t my medium, Samantha, I much prefer my own innovation of the proem.

…one of our mothers might say, didn’t I tell you not to go Ivy? All these Ivy schools are in such terrible towns. Why didn’t you go to that other program – you know, the one in the little nowhere town where they grow corn?

Equally well done was the development of the individual Bunnies. In Bunny, they operated largely as a unit, whereas in this book, we get to know each of them, and it’s gloriously funny.

She had the most Victorian face. Like she might faint or get tuberculosis any minute. Yet there was a fuck you quality to her eyes. It arrested me, Bunny. She was wearing a gross, grungy plaid, like her beauty was trying to graffiti itself. Terrible, yet I couldn’t look away. I was mesmerized by her aggressively unbrushed hair, which I immediately longed to tie into complex knots I’d discovered on the internet.

Awad’s creativity is truly on show in the sections of the novel written from the perspective of Aerius, one of the Bunnies’ man/rabbit creations. Awad plays with language, for example Aerius refers to laptops, gin and poets as lappy-tops, Juniper Sap and Poet Trees.

In the words of one of the Bunnies, it’s all ‘…so very five-star Alice in Wonderland‘ – it’s mad, polarising, fun. Grab some miniature cupcakes and strap in.

3.5/5 (half a mark off because it was a tad too long)

I’d stumble out of the bedroom, still in my red cloak, to find you doing barre in your sun-splashed living room. Or in your retro kitchen, already dressed in one of your sky dresses, making yourself a London Fog and humming along to Chappell Roan. Or perhaps sitting on your petal pouf, pretending to read beneath the framed print of Marilyn Monroe also pretending to read.