ALICE'S FARM

With the future of their valley home at stake, two brave young rabbits take up farming.

The farm’s newbie human owners include the Harvey parents, country enthusiasts newly liberated from office life; son Carl, 10, who misses Brooklyn; daughter Marie, 1; and the family’s shiba inu, Foxy. When an intimidating local developer drops by, hoping to pressure the naïve Harveys into selling, young Alice and her brother, Thistle, two rabbits, overhear the sales pitch. After Lester, a burrow elder who’s eaten his way through farm catalogs, tells them that development will destroy their valley, Alice hatches a plan to make the Harveys’ farm succeed. Challenges quickly mount. To obtain and plant seeds, weed, and keep hungry critters away from them when they sprout, Alice must incentivize interspecies cooperation. Recruits, wild and tame, are needed: a fox, bald eagle, chipmunks, voles, Foxy, baby Marie (an adept interspecies interpreter), and Carl, providing human cover for the rabbit farmers. The effort will eventually ensnare neighbors, ornithologists, and locavore chefs along with the editors of Hipster Farmer magazine. Like the denizens of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, these characters—animal and human, predator and prey—are lovingly observed. They are a deeply engaging, mostly endearing bunch whose natures may put them at odds but who share a world. Human characters follow a White default.

Stoutly non-speciesist, this is an effervescent delight.