"Good Both Going and Coming Back": Rabbit and the Motorbike by Kate Hoefler

Rabbit lived in a quiet field of wheat that he never left--not even once--even though there was a road. And even though he dreamed that he did every night.

But Rabbit has a friend, Dog, who has a motorbike and once followed that road everywhere, where he saw many wonderful things.

He loved telling Rabbit about the places he'd felt most alive.

Dog made Rabbit feel that he had been with him in all those places. But one day Dog was gone, leaving Rabbit with only remembered stories and his motorbike.

For a long time Rabbit stays home, but when he looks at the motorbike and remembers Dog's stories he realizes that he, too, can now go anywhere he wants as Dog did. Still, Rabbit is timid.

Yet one day Rabbit decides to ride the motorbike--

Just down the road....But roads are long.

Rabbit forgot that.

Like all roads, Rabbit's road is connected to all the roads in the world and he saw much of it--giant redwoods, the ocean, and the great desert....

And Rabbit felt Dog right there with him.

And full of stories that are his own, Rabbit returns and finds a young friend to share them with, in Kate Hoefler's Rabbit and the Motorbike: (Books about Friendship, Inspirational Books for Kids, Children's Adventure Books, Children's Emotion Books) (Chronicle Books, 2019). This is a quiet  book with beautiful illustrations, a layered metaphoric story about the courage to discover the world and yourself, well and simply told. Says Kirkus in their starred reviews, "Exhilarating... Graceful text and evocative illustrations combine in this story about ... facing fears and trying something new."

High Hopes! The Almost Impossible Thing by Basak Aguoglu

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A DREAM.

A DREAM THAT TRIED TO TAKE SHAPE.

Birds do it. They fly through the sky. Why not a rabbit?

Little rabbit works with what he's got--long ears. But there's no liftoff, no matter how hard he flaps them like a bird or rotates them like a maple helicopter. He can't get off the ground.

He adds feathers and faces into wind. No luck. He tries skiing off a ski jump and ends up cooling his heels in a snow bank. He hang-glides off a cliff, but still finds that the law of gravity trumps high hopes every time.

Rabbit goes up and ... down.

He gets the gear--helmet and goggles and all--but it's still a no go. Should he tuck his dream away in a tiny box?

"You can do anything if you try!" they say. "Dream BIG!" they say.

In a true "flight of fancy," a charmingly envisioned little rabbit takes off into the wild blue yonder in Basak Aguoglu's little parable of dreaming big. Unlike Dumbo, the flying elephant of Disney fame, for this little rabbit, equipped as he is with a pair of inauspicious skinny ears, independent flight seems impossible, no matter how hard he flaps or rotates his ears. There's no solo flight in his future.

So our bunny thinks outside his box. If he can't realize his dream of solo flight, perhaps there could be success in a crowd-sourcing configuration. If he can just get enough flight-fancying rabbits together in an aerodynamic form, maybe they can get his dream off the ground....

Basak Aguoglu's The Almost Impossible Thing (Philomel Books, 2017) puts in a plug for big dreams, for creative thinking, and for getting by with a little help from your friends, in a fancifully styled tale that provides fun along the way in its light and loose illustrations, done in blackline and bright gouache accents, with an admittedly cute little hero with twenty-one look-alike buddies who come to share his dream. It's a strange story with pleasantly free-floating artwork and design that makes it all seem somehow possible, if not all that likely. But after all, even youngsters will intuit that this is less a how-to manual and more of a fable for the more imaginative mind. "A difficult but rewarding debut," says Kirkus Reviews.