RABBIT, HARE, AND BUNNY

“Rabbit is neat [and] Hare is organized,” but Bunny is messy, loud, and inconsiderate, which makes for a tough co-living arrangement.

Rabbit and Hare use devices to listen to their favorite music privately while Bunny dances around the house loudly strumming his banjo. Bunny neglects his share of household chores, leaving the others to pick up the slack. He interrupts them when they have visitors and makes noise when they need to concentrate, and he hogs their shared facilities. Frustrated and exasperated, his roommates ask Bunny to leave. Bunny moves back home with his parents, but the readjustment is difficult. Rabbit and Hare’s search for a new roommate is just as unsuccessful. They discover they miss one another, so Bunny moves back in with a better attitude, and Hare and Rabbit are more tolerant of his quirks. These anthropomorphic leporidae present as male young adults. Their appearances and personalities are distinct and amusing in Langdo’s bright ink-and-watercolor illustrations, complementing and enhancing the text with detailed vignettes of the action. Broder keeps the tone light in this gentle lesson in tolerance, consideration, and getting along. But the concept of living with roommates instead of their families will probably be foreign to many young readers and outside their developmental comfort zones; these are not child stand-ins à la Frog and Toad but rather young, independent adults.

A sweet tale but not in the audience’s developmental wheelhouse.