Funny Bunnies: Cottontail Tales for Easter

What with sheltering in place and libraries and book stores close, it's not easy to hunt up new books about that Bunny who brings the Easter basket. Here are a few books about all things Easter-ish and some other seasonal stories that are eggs-actly what we need:

It's time for those bouncing bunnies, cheeping chicks, and dandy ducklings to make their annual appearance celebrating the return of spring. Here is a collection of hippity-hoppity stories that remind us that Easter is on its way!

Katherine Tegen's The Story of the Easter Bunny gives a nod to the folkloric roots of the Easter Rabbit, long a symbol of new life.

On a snow-cold day
in a snug little house,
a round old couple
were making Easter eggs...
while their little rabbit watched.

Little rabbit watches the couple blow and paint the eggs, make chocolate candies, and fill baskets for the children of the village. Gradually, as the couple grow older, the little rabbit, now grown big and strong, takes over the job. He becomes so famed in his village that he has to move his operations to a secret egg shop beneath a hollow tree and becomes Easter Rabbit to the world.

A simple sweet story illustrated in soft pastel watercolors by Sally Ann Lambert, this one is just right for young children, who may be inspired to search for the entrance to that secret Easter egg workshop themselves.

Charlotte Zolotow's classic, The Bunny Who Found Easter has charmed generations of small children with its story of a bunny who looks for "other rabbits like himself for company." The wise owl suggests that there are always rabbits at Easter, but can't tell the bunny where Easter is. "It must be some place to the east," he offers.

The bunny searches through hot summer sun and rain storms and winter snows, where he snuggles inside a hollow tree "alone in a world without rabbits." At last spring leads him to a beautiful bunny with bright eyes and long ears just like his, in "a time when everything lovely began once again."

Nancy Tafuri's Caldecott story of a runaway eighth duckling is a bundle of spring fun. One of the eight ducklings steals out of the nest and is seen "hiding" while Mother Duck goes about inquiring of all the pond animals for him. Kids love spotting the independent duckling watching from behind trees, flowers, and clumps of grass while his mom looks for him. This one is just right for a handy little board book, but is available as well in paperback or hardcover editions. Also by Tafuri is her wonderful story which begins with a bunny, I Love You, Little One in which little animals ask for reassurance that their mothers will always love them. Their lyrical answers ("I love you as the wild rye loves you, gently swaying above you, giving you food and cover from harm.") and Tafuri's elegant, fullsome illustrations are as warm as the child's bedtime embrace which ends the story.

What would the Easter holiday be without a Max and Ruby story? Rosemary Wells has one for us in Max's Chocolate Chicken (Max and Ruby). Max has eyes only for the huge chocolate chicken, the prize for the Easter egg hunt, but Ruby sternly hands Max his basket and says in her best big sister voice, "No eggs, no chicken!" While Ruby fills her basket with eggs, Max sneaks the chocolate chicken from its birdbath perch and makes short work of the delicious tail feathers. But the Easter Bunny (who has been visibly spying on the whole business) replaces the chicken with a chocolate goose for both Ruby and Max to share.

For slightly older kids who are weary of bunny and eggs stories, the perfect anti-cute-critter antidote is The Dumb Bunnies' Easter. Sue Denim's and Dav Pilkey's evergreen spoof of all things festive begins as the Dumb Bunny family chooses an Easter tree, spray-paints fried eggs, stuffs a turkey (through the basketball goal), and waits for Santa's minivan pulled by eight cranky pilgrims. This delightfully goofy mish-mash of popular customs will have children rolling in the aisles. Even when the Dumb Bunnies' colored eggs splatter down the chimney, it's an EGGS-tra good time for all.

Wait Just a Mini-Moment!! Mini Rabbit Is NOT LOST by John Bond

Mini Rabbit and Mother Rabbit are making a cake.

"CAKE! CAKE! CAKE!" chants Mini Rabbit!

But then Mother Rabbit has sad news. They are fresh out of berries!

But Mini Rabbit is adamant!

"I will find berries!"

Strapping on his little red backpack, Mini Rabbit hops off in search of that quintessential ingredient.

But there are no berries in the berry patch.

Mini Rabbit forges on. Inquisitive animals query Mini Rabbit about what he's doing, but this resolute rabbit pushes on, crossing prairies, rowing rivers, and scaling rocky mountainsides, rappelling down from snowy precipices, persevering in his dogged quest for berries. At last he discovers a deep cave and inside he finds--one berry.

And then from far away across the world, Mini Rabbit catches the scent of--Mother Rabbit's cake!

It's berry cake at last. But--What? No ice cream?

Some of us are never satisfied, as with John Bond's quixotic character in his Mini Rabbit Is Not Lost (Neal Porter Books, 2019). In this heroic quest, author-illustrator Bond sets his stylized and stylish but relentless little figure within a rather realistic background of prairies, forests, an ocean with a lighthouse, and high mountain peaks, tiny in a vast landscape, but as unstoppable as that famous battery bunny. Savvy readers will chuckle as they spot who's harvested all the berries as flocks of dark birds fly by with berries in their beaks. Be sure you've got all the ingredients for cake when you share this one!"Charming and whimsical—sure to bring smiles, says Kirkus Reviews.

Bunnicula Returns? Big Bunny by Rowboat Watkins

Once upon a time, there was a BIG BUNNY.

So begins the purported bedtime story, as parent and child cuddle cozily together in bed under a carrot-printed coverlet. Time for little bunnies to settle down to beddy-bye?

Not exactly. This BIG BUNNY is not cut out to be a warm and fuzzy bedtime bunny. In this fractured bedtime story, the young one, seeking something scary, kidnaps the main character, the would-be centerpiece of this nighty-night tale. He interrupts....

A ginormously SCARY bunny?

The parent tries to continue the narration of a regular big bunny who lives, not on a gigantic carrot asteroid careening in space, but a regular, round planet and eats, not monstrous carrots, but just nice normal orange carrots, not too small, carrots that...

When do we get to the SCARY part?

The storyteller tries to beef up the tale, allowing his Big Bunny to have terrible manners, eating ten carrots at a time, swallowing them whole. Truckloads of carrots....

Does Big Bunny EAT the trucks?

The narrator nixes any suggestions that the trucks have more taste and crunch, but does allow a concession, giving them a horrible fate--stuck in traffic-- requiring the penguins who drive the trucks to construct bridges to give them a way out of the jam.

Penguins drive trucks? This story is WORSE than traffic!

By this time, this bedtime bunny story is well on its way to becoming the story of the Big Bunny Who Ate Cleveland, or whatever city it is that he wants to crunch! The beleaguered storyteller objects, speaking with the voice of reason....

BUILDINGS AREN'T EDIBLE!

I wouldn't tell Big Bunny that.

By this time, our young storyline pirate has totally taken over the whole plotline, in Rowboat Watkins' bizarre bedtime story, Big Bunny (Chronicle Books, 2018). And, sure enough, there's still a surprise in Watkins' next-to-last two-page spread where the, um, crunchy identity of the two storytellers is revealed and a really SCARY conclusion is, well, foreshadowed! Rowboat Watkins' picture books are cleverly conceived and illustrated with an iconic and ironic sense of humor that pleases young readers. "The infectious fun continues to the ending, which will be—trust me—a giant, hilarious surprise to both parents and kids," says The New York Times Book Review.

Share this one with Watkin's weird hit story, Rude Cakes (see review here) and do not miss this chance to read the Aaron Reynolds' Caldecott-winning Creepy Carrots! and Creepy Pair of Underwear! (reviews here).

Sunrise, Sunset....: Good Day, Good Night by Margaret Wise Brown

"Good morning, world! Hello, day light!"
Good day, everyone. Good bye, night!"

Every new day is a gift, and to this young bunny, an adventure. The quiet of dawn soon yields to the bustle of morning jobs, and the aproned baker pops out to sweep the sidewalk of The Bunbunnerie, and the milkman from  the Harey Dairy delivers bottles of cold milk to everyone's doors. Even the baby birds get fed their breakfasts.

Bunny drinks his cup of milk as Kitty wakes up, too.

"Good morning to you. Open your eyes.
Every day is a new surprise."

And the two are off to see what's doing downtown, where little ones play ball and grown-ups are busy plying their trades while the sun shines.

But the sun rolls on across the sky to the west and begins to set, the moon starts to rise, and things begin to settle down. The parent birds fly back to the nest, and with a good night wish to the trees and the bees, Bunny walks back home in the lingering sunset.

Everyone is heading home, and so are Bunny and Kitty. In his little striped pajamas, in his cozy bedroom, he bids his kitty and all his toys a good night.

"Good night, bear. Good night people, everywhere."

In this lovely edition of Margaret Wise Brown's heretofore unpublished Good Day, Good Night (Harper, 2017), young readers will hear echoes of the cadence of Brown's later beloved bedtime story, Goodnight Moon, newly illustrated for the first time by the inimitable and award-winning Loren Long, whose soft, rounded forms and muted colors meld perfectly with the quiet, old-fashioned tone of Brown's soothing rhymed text, with the added pleasure of images from Brown's classic story strategically represented, especially in Bunny's cozy bedroom. Sunrise and sunset mark the movement of time, and youngsters will feel the push and pull of that daily cycle in this old, but new bedtime story from a master storyteller, illustrated fittingly by a modern master artist.

As Kirkus Reviews writes in their starred review, "With pleasing echoes of Brown's famous classic, including bookends of a cow jumping over a moon, this bedtime story will entice families back again and again."