Margaret Wise Brown, The Runaway Bunny. Illustrated by Clement Hurd. New York: HarperCollins, 1942.
When a child is first able to walk and to run with ease, the urge to do so overtakes them, and they run everywhere. Adults dashing after the child only add to the delight of this game, the child chortling and running, running, running... But with this newfound ability come newfound fears--what if I run so fast and so far that they can never find me again?
This is where The Runaway Bunny comes in. When a child is caught in this moment of autonomy and its correspondent fears, this book is immensely consoling. A little bunny wants to run away. His mother assures him that she will run after him. But what if I change?, he wonders, what then? For every transformation that he can imagine, his mother imagines another that will allow her to stay close by without impinging on the transformation itself, until finally, he decides just to be her little bunny, and eat carrots with her.
Although the story is often deeply disturbing to adults, with its mother bunny who seems unable to let go, to let her child make his wn way into the world, the truth is that children who are experimenting with running away for the very first time in their lives, who are coming to grips with the notion that they can put so much space between themselves and those who love them as to be lost, it is an enormously comforting read.
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