The Tale of Peter Rabbit

The Bibliography
Potter, Beatrix. 2001. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Ill. by Michael Hague. New York: SeaStar Books. ISBN 1587170523

The Plot
Mrs. Rabbit goes to market one morning and leaves explicit instructions for her little rabbit children, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter, to stay away from Mr. McGregor's garden, lest they be made into rabbit pie like their dear old father. Of course, Peter goes straight there and gets into trouble. Mr. McGregor catches him wandering through the garden and chases him through the cabbages, the potatoes, the gooseberries and finally into the toolshed. Unfortunatley, during this little escapade, Peter loses his shoes and his fancy jacket. Looking for the gate so he can go home, he comes across a mouse and a cat, but neither help him find his way out. He finally spots the gate, but it's right behind Mr. McGregor! Peter sneaks around and escapes under the gate just as Mr. McGregor spots him again. Since he's so tired from his brush with rabbit pie, Peter collapses as soon as he gets back home. Mrs. Rabbit puts him in bed with a spoonful of camomile tea while his sisters enjoy a delicious meal of bread, milk and blackberries. Poor, poor Peter should have listened to his mother.

The Analysis
The artwork for this book was made with pen and ink, watercolor and colored pencils and it creeps me out. The colors are rich and beautiful and some of the illustrations don't freak me out, but some of them definitely do. The page where Peter rushes all over the garden and loses his shoes is perhaps the creepiest of all. It should almost be called Peter Rabid instead of Peter Rabbit.... Anyway, other than the sometimes eerie illustrations, this tale of a badly behaved bunny teaches us all a lesson - to listen to our elders and always follow directions! Children may not understand all the words, such as the sparrows "who flew to [Peter] in great excitement, and implored him to exert himself," but they'd get the idea that the sparrows came to help Peter when he was in trouble by looking the illustrations, and that's what good illustrators do... even though I didn't like the illustrations, I can appreciate the richness of them.

The Review
Kathy Broderick (Booklist, Jul. 1, 2001 (Vol. 97, No. 21))
As he has done before, Hague lends his own style to a classic title in the canon of children's literature. Enlarging the original size of Potter's book and decreasing the length to standard picture-book size, he brings the famous story to a new audience. The flow of text and turn of the page has been changed substantially, but Peter is larger in these pictures, and the colors of his world much brighter. Hague adds details that don't appear in Potter's illustrations--a bright red door on the tree house, the inside of the baker's shop, the "large pea" in the old mouse's mouth. There's also more of Mr. McGregor's garden, his house, and the wood beyond. There are fewer illustrations in Hague's version, but his double-page spreads flesh out Potter's world (as the video adaptations of her stories do, as well). This format is certainly better suited to storytimes, and the text, with one exception, is faithful to the original: the white cat is now black, and the word white has been deleted.

The Connection
So, since I chose to review three rabbit books for the picture book genre, I apparently, deep down on the inside, want to do a Rabbit Storytime. I'd add in a few more books, like Bunnies on the Go by Rick Walton or any of the Nicky books by Valeri Gorbachev (Nicky and the Big Bad Wolves, Nicky and the Fantastic Birthday Gift, or Nicky and the Rainy Day). If I don't do a Rabbit Storytime, I at least need to make myself some bunny ears to wear around the library to quell the urge.