First sentence: All the Hill was boiling with excitement. On every side there rose a continual chattering and squeaking, whispering and whistling, as the Animals discussed the great news. Through it all could be heard again and again the words, "New Folks coming."
Premise/plot: Rabbit Hill is an animal fantasy novel that won the Newbery Medal in 1945. Little Georgie, one of the characters, is bringing news with him: NEW folks are moving in. Will the NEW folks be good or bad for the Hill? Will the animals lives be better for the change or worse? No doubt about it, times have been hard the past few years. But are good days ahead of them again? Little Georgie, unlike his mother, is prone to hope instead of worry.
The animal community is unbalanced. They depend on the humans--for gardens, for scraps, etc. But they also dread the humans--guns, traps, dogs. The animals are starving because there aren't any humans there to care for the land. But are humans the answer?
My thoughts: It was a quick read. I will give it that. I'm not sure if I liked it. I didn't dislike it, mind you; my reaction wasn't that strong. The book introduces us to many characters. (My favorite character was Little Georgie. I felt no connection to the others, not really.)
Overall, I found the book a bit on the boring side. I didn't want to find it boring. I wanted it to be a fabulous animal fantasy like Charlotte's Web. But at the very least it wasn't a Stuart Little!
© 2018 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
2 comments:
I'm a https://usabookreviewers.com/ reviewer (it's how I get my Red Rising Trilogy books in advance, woohoo!) so it was really interesting to hear about it from the other side. I'd been wondering because I wanted to know if it was something to recommend to my author clients.
I loved it as a child and have kept it, so it meant quite a lot to me. I liked the excitement of the new folks coming (ooh my, ooh my!) and in those days there were no animal films to compare it with. It was quite different from animal books that I'd known from babyhood such as Beatrix Potter's. The illustrations seemed quite aggressive compared with Potter's, but then they were for a different demographic. Love the idea of reviewing 1944 books as that is the year I was born!
Post a Comment