My Friend Rabbit (Caldecott Medal Award)

I reviewed the book My Friend Rabbit by Eric Rohmann, who wrote and illustrated the book. The first thing that grabbed my attention when I read this book was the dark black outline around the drawings. This made the illustrations really "pop out" at the reader. The colors were so bold and vivid. Another thing I really noticed was the details of each character in the story. It added so much to the tone the author was trying to set for the story.

The story was about a rabbit who is friends with a mouse. The rabbit is known for getting himself into "messes". When mouse gets his airplane stuck in a tree, rabbit is there with one of his brilliant ideas to get the plane out of the tree. Rabbit uses some unwilling animals and stacks them up until mouse is able to reach the airplane. Well, you can imagine what happens! All the animals come crashing down and they aren't very happy about it. Just when rabbit thinks he's going to get it, mouse swoops in with his freed airplane to rescue rabbit from the angry animals. Mouse knows that rabbit is his friend and really means well by his attempts to try and help him. Anyway, rabbit is so grateful mouse rescued him, that he gives mouse a big hug that blocks his vision and mouse crashes into another tree. At least rabbit has another great idea to get it out!

I think we all know children who can relate to rabbit. They have such big hearts and try to help, but end up messing everything up. But, what I got from the story was that true friendship is looking over each other's imperfections and loving them anyway. What a great message to teach our kids!

Another thing I really liked about the book, was that each page left you hanging and wondering what would happen next. This would be a great in having the students make predictions about what they thought was going to happen next.

There really wasn't anything I didn't like about the book. It was a delightful story with a great message!