A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I requested a review copy of Polly Horvath’s then-new children’s novel, Mr and Mrs. Bunny–Detectives Extraordinaire (2012). The quirky premise — a pair of rabbits taking on the role of detectives (duh) — gave me some strong The Rescuers vibes, and being a bit of a closet animal fantasy nerd, I figured it was up my alley. And then I promptly forgot about it until now. You’re free to call me a monster.
The story splits its time between Madeline, Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, and the Grand Poobah, who is mostly there to be the menacing villain. For Madeline, island life with her extreme hippy parents, Mildred and Flo, is no picnic, especially when it comes to her education and desire to fit in with “normal society.” But when her parents are kidnapped by what appears to be a car full of foxes and she discovers a note demanding to know the whereabouts of her code-breaking uncle, she must set out to save them. Enter Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, a couple of country bunnies who move to a more bustling bunny valley and decide to try their hand at being detectives, which they do by simply wearing fedoras. When they stumble upon Madeline, who can curiously understand them, they set out in their clunky way to help her find her parents and put an end to whatever the foxes are really planning. And meanwhile still, the Grand Poobah, the leader of the foxes, just wants someone to decode a set of coded recipe cards so he can make bank in his rabbit and rabbit by-products facctory. Hi-jinks ensue.
The thing about time is that it is often unkind even to seemingly silly books meant for children. This is a fact I discovered while reading Mary Norton’s The Magic Bed Knob (1945) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947), the former of which, while still mostly fun, spends a great deal of time hammering home a familiar colonial and racist narrative about island peoples and cannibalism. For the amusement of children. Ho hum. Time has been no less kind to Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, a book that, as the title of this review suggests, takes a decidedly conservative direction in its quirky story, something which, I’m afraid, I did not find amusing. The novel does not simply parrot loose conservative ideas about culture or narrative or simply present them as jokes that the reader is meant to be “in” on; rather, it seems to relish in these ideas with an almost brutal efficiency. Worse, it harbors contempt for its political opposite while parroting and delighting in ideals that, at best, are “Uncle Joe at Thanksgiving” acceptable and, at worst, toxic.
The most obvious example of this conservatism (small “c,” not big “c”) is in the novel’s treatment of Madeline’s parents. From the start, they are presented as woefully clueless hippies with little to no regard for the well-being of their child or for, well, anything but their eclectic set of hippy ideals. They refuse to work to cover expenses, they reject with self-righteous aplomb any semblance of modern society, and they regularly insult and belittle Madeline’s interests in school, graduation, or, well, anything. If that’s not enough, the narrator reminds us over and over that hippies are bad people: ignorant, abusive, and contemptible. If not for this being a book for kids, you might call this portrayal a flat straw man, a deliberate distortion of actual people for a political message.
Yet, because it is for kids, it feels even worse, especially in light of the fact that the novel’s heroes are the polar opposite and yet are meant to be viewed as a fun, quirky, and eccentric alternative to Madeline’s parents. They are caring and loving, but Mr. Bunny is also “that man,” repeatedly making things up despite Mrs. Bunny’s protests and repeatedly ignoring Mrs. Bunny’s wishes and desires. He rarely consults Mrs. Bunny about his decisions that affect her and regularly rejects her opinions even though it’s obvious to the reader that she is right. This is meant to be “cute,” but it comes off as a stereotypical “that man” marriage, rife with the sexist tropes one expects of the stereotype. Mr. Bunny even gifts us with numerous cultural rants, including one gem in which he lectures everyone about why tipping waiters is an affront to decency, which he uses as an excuse to leave a poor tip. Anyone spending time on social media will recognize this story in the numerous examples of customers leaving rude notes to waiters to explain why they didn’t tip.
All of this is buried in a narrative style that comes off as less quirky than self-obsessed and assured of its cleverness. The novel regularly wanders into rambling “jokes” about all manner of tangents. Sometimes they are actually amusing, but most of the time they distract from or come off as replacements for the story. For example, consider this:
And here Mr. Bunny paused for dramatic effect. He paused so long that several councilbunnies went out for coffee. One had time to order a short decaf double shot no whip mocha iced frappuccino to go. Mr. Bunny paused so long that when the councilbunny’s coffee cam, he had time to change his mind to a venti semi-skimmed soy no sugar caramel macchiato with no whip but double caramel and a reduced-fat skinny poppy seed and lemon muffin, hot, no butter. When the councilbunnies got back, Mr. Bunny was almost done pausing. They sipped their coffee and turned their attention back to him.
Page 185-186.
First, I’d like to know how many children reading this book could reasonably understand both the cacophony of Starbucksian coffee slang and the sentence itself, which even a learned adult would struggle to read. Second, I’d like to know what the point of this was. Is it meant to be funny because, haha, bunnies like the same eccentric mouth-gumming coffee monstrosities as we do? Maybe this sort of humor was “in” back in 2012, but by golly does it come off as trite here (if not a tad insulting to people who actually enjoy their complex coffees). In terms of the plot, the dramatic pausing only exists to set up this “joke,” but within the context of what is actually happening (Mr. Bunny is on trial for consorting with marmots and humans, which, admittedly, is kinda amusing) it doesn’t really do anything but delay the inevitable: Mr. Bunny declaring that Madeline is their pet, and thus not subject to the law. If not for the previous 180+ pages of random tangents as setups for hopelessly modern “jokes,” I might have found this at least a tad amusing, but so much of Horvath’s book is stuffed with this stuff, delaying the plot for what seems an eternity.
These tangents also set up another critical flaw: the lackluster and largely unexplored animal fantasy. In the best talking animal books, the authors either totally excise any sense that the animals live in separate worlds from humans or attempt to imagine an animal society extrapolated from the actual animals. Here, however, there’s little logic to the existence of a bunny society (or any other animal societies). When the story needs them to have some feature, it gives it to them. Horvath neither commits to a fully realized animal society separate from humans or to a fully conceived anthropomorphic animal society. Instead, there are explicit descriptions of bunny behaviors paired with explicit descriptions of bunnies as nothing more than tiny humans with fur. This is meant to be quirky and fun, but it comes off more like a novel that doesn’t know what it wants to be.
As much as I wish I could say something nice about this book beyond the lovely illustrations by Sophie Blackall, in the end, I found it tacky, overly obsessed with its own cleverness, and, frankly, insulting. This isn’t a book in the vein of The Rescuers or Stuart Little. It’s a book that is too self-absorbed to realize that its contempt for its characters, its valorization of abusive tropes, and its incessant tangents and desperation to seem clever makes it memorable for the wrong reasons. It’s not a book for kids. It’s a training manual for conservative rabbits. And there’s a bloody sequel…
