Picture Books for a Hoppy Spring

Kids love bunnies, even ones who don’t bring chocolate. The bunny in the built-in den in the entrance to the Niles Library Youth Services Dept. has many small fans, who stop by to say hello on the way in and wave goodbye on the way out. Kids love bunny books, too, and there are lots of great ones. Here are some of my favorites.

Little White Rabbit by Kevin Henkes uses a luscious springtime palette of pale greens, pinks and blues to tell the story of an imaginative little bunny. Everything he sees makes him wonder, what it would be like to be green, like the grass, or tall like the tree? Children wait with anticipation for the turn of the page to reveal what the bunny looks like when he is green, or has wings like a butterfly. Surprisingly, one of the things wiggly children love the best when listening to this book is taking a few moments to be perfectly still, like when the bunny is imagining being a rock. This continues Henkes’ string of excellent picture books for very young children.

The venerable author Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon) must have had an especially soft spot for bunnies, because she wrote several memorable books featuring them. In the very simple Home for a Bunny, a fuzzy little brown rabbit investigates several possible homes before finding one with a fuzzy little white rabbit. Garth Williams’ paintings make the bunnies look enticingly soft, and he collaborated again with Brown on my favorite Easter book, The Golden Egg Book, in which a bunny tries to figure out what’s inside an egg. A third book by Brown is one that adults either love or hate. In The Runaway Bunny, a mother bunny tells her baby that no matter where he tries to run, she will always pursue him, a concept some find touching and others find smothering. Either way, Clement Hurd’s illustrations are whimsical and lovely.

Gardeners are not always so crazy about bunnies, and in Candace Fleming’s Muncha! Muncha! Muncha! Mr. McGreeley does battle with a trio of persistent little rabbits who come to his garden: “When the sun went down and the moon came up, three hungry bunnies appeared. Tippy—Tippy—Tippy, Pat! Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!” Mr. McGreeley puts up a fence (that the bunnies jump over), a wall (that the bunnies dig under), and so on until at last he has encased his garden in an impenetrable fortress. But as Brian Karas’s hilarious illustrations show, sometimes the only way to get into a garden is to go in with the gardener. This makes a great read-aloud, with lots of opportunities for joining in on the refrain: “Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!”

Last is a book that technically isn’t exactly about bunnies, but about dust bunnies instead. The winner of this year’s Monarch Award, which is chosen by Illinois children in grades 1-3, Rhyming Dust Bunnies by Jan Thomas. It features Thomas’s typically bold, exuberant illustrations, with four dust bunnies--Ed, Ned, Ted, and Bob--who love to play a rhyming game. Ed, Ned, and Ted are good at coming up with rhymes: “far, jar, tar,” but “LOOK!” says Bob. “No, Bob…’LOOK!’ does not rhyme with car!” they tell him. It’s a very fun choice for kids on the verge of reading for themselves, who know very well that when someone tells you to look, you’d better LOOK!

Even if real-life dust bunnies or hungry bunny rabbits are your sworn enemies, try reading a bunny book this spring with a little one. Don’t forget to show them that their own two fingers can turn their hand into a bunny that can go hopping happily along.