‘We Love You, Bunny’ Is Stranger and More Ambitious Than ‘Bunny’

While this is funny, Awad also uses this perspective shift to emphasize how dark the bunny-into-man process is. Elsinore’s callous voice narrates how disturbed Aerius was from the jump: After the Bunnies take him back to Kyra’s apartment, where he was “born,” Aerius “screamed a little” and “began to resist.” As Elsinore continues, he “screamed for a good hour and then quieted down and then screamed again.” But she has explanations ready for Sam, to whom she’s telling this story. “Did we have to tie him up a little” and “gag him”? Just a little, because “the constant screaming would have alarmed Kyra’s neighbors.” The Bunnies are doing this for Aerius’ own good—and they believe they are entitled to do so because he belongs to them; after all, they made him. 

But as time passes, they are frustrated by Aerius’ lack of interest in their books, films, and sexual advances, and find themselves arguing with each other over who has the biggest claim to Aerius and his affections. They don’t feel they should have to persuade Aerius to love them: He should do so automatically. In the midst of this conflict, Aerius escapes.

Here, Awad further diverges from her previous style by letting Aerius take the reins. In long sections written from his point of view, Awad flexes her creative muscles to glorious effect: Aerius, a newborn creature, writes in unusual English (referring, for example, to “Poet Trees” and “Manny Scripts”) with a generous helping of capital letters and emojis, stylistic choices he’s absorbed from his creators. If Sam was an outsider, she was at least still a familiar protagonist; Aerius, meanwhile, is an outsider to the human race. However, his journey feels like an appropriate continuation of Bunny in certain respects. He plays a similar role to Sam’s in the first novel: Both are figures the Bunnies find fascinating and want to keep in their orbit, and like Sam, Aerius is a writer (the sections from his point of view are a book he is writing). Also like Sam, Aerius forges a bond with Jonah, a lovable and ego-free poet who serves as a foil to the Bunnies. In Bunny, Sam mostly brushes Jonah off; here, Aerius immediately falls madly in love with him, a queer romance that subverts the obsessive heterosexuality of the Bunnies’ desire for Aerius.

Aerius’ journey is different from Sam’s in crucial ways, however. Unlike in Bunny or Awad’s other novels, We Love You, Bunny depicts Aerius’ quest to find himself and be free of his creators, rather than a story in which he succumbs to outside influence. In this way, there’s an obvious literary resemblance: Frankenstein’s monster. In both We Love You, Bunny and Frankenstein, hubristic creators “make” new humans, and feel that they should possess them after they’ve been born. Both books are metaphors for the complexities of motherhood, and both feature long passages narrated by the “creatures” that prove they have insight and emotion greater than those of their creator(s). Because, although he hates them, Aerius is undoubtedly a creation of the Bunnies: his fascination with writing and fiction—and his unfortunate, manic desire to “kill Allan,” their supposedly abusive writing instructor, a compulsion that causes him problems throughout the novel.

Perhaps Awad’s most radical and most sentimental idea is that in order to write, people need help from others.

In the centuries since Frankenstein, countless other writers have explored the complex dynamics that result from both academia and creativity; recently, authors have been especially interested in the toxic relationships that can result from these scenarios. Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024) and Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory (2025) similarly pose questions that place creative work in conflict with the body. In Come and Get It, visiting professor Agatha Paul establishes a relationship with a student, Millie, who allows her to eavesdrop on her dorm neighbors in exchange for cash. Agatha turns these snippets of dialogue into funny, demeaning articles about youth culture for Teen Vogue. One of the articles is about Millie herself, with whom Agatha also embarks on a sexual relationship. In Seduction Theory, MFA student Robbie writes her thesis (presented as the book we are reading) about the sexual relationship between her female advisor, with whom she has a flirtatious relationship, and her professor’s unfaithful husband. We can’t trust Robbie’s depiction of reality, given her biases and her limited perspective, and when she writes that the husband figure “suffered from delusions of control,” it’s hard not to read this as a statement about herself. Has Robbie’s professor taken advantage of her, and is this book a form of revenge? Or is it a violation? Adrian offers no easy answers.

All artists deal with questions of creative ownership, but academia makes these stakes more visible and rigid, while sex makes them infinitely more morally complex. In We Love You, Bunny, Awad takes these ideas a step further by literally personifying the act of creativity. Robbie writes about her teacher in Seduction Theory, but her book isn’t itself a human person. Aerius is, and that makes the ferocious desires of the Bunnies and others to possess him all the more alarming and intense.

It comes as no surprise that Aerius eventually escapes the clutches of the Bunnies and his other pursuers: As one character tells him, “You’re a Fiction. Serendipity is naturally on your Side.” The novel is propelled in part by a sense of driving plot, familiar from ancient stories and fairy tales—Aerius falls in love, he is captured by evil witches, he must escape the curse that has been placed upon him—but it also feels fresh, in part because Aerius is such an unusual character in other ways. His unfamiliarity with the world makes him a perfect artist, someone who can observe what is going on around him without preconceived notions of how things are “supposed” to be. After being created in an act of strange, malign artistry, Aerius becomes the book’s most important artist, a writer who surpasses his creators. 

By writing, he can work out his own emotions and react against the people trying to control him. He is especially motivated to write by his love for Jonah, the poetry student and the only character in the book who doesn’t want to control him. This draws yet another parallel with Sam, who also found an ally in Jonah with Bunny. In both Bunny and We Love You, Bunny, Sam and Aerius use creativity to escape the clutches of the Bunnies, but they don’t do it entirely alone. Perhaps Awad’s most radical and most sentimental idea is that in order to write, people need help from others—as long as those helpers want them to be free, instead of wanting to control them, or lock them up in the attic.

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