Monday Book Review: A Bunny Caper

The bulk of my reading is middle grade, YA, and adult, but getting the galleys for Polly Horvath's Mr. and Mrs Bunny--Detectives Extraordinaire! made my week, and I'm not even exaggerating. I haven't howled through a book this way since David Sedaris's Naked. And to think it was a chapter book that left me gasping! Mr. and Mrs. Bunny is targeting two completely different demographics, I suspect: seven- to ten-year-olds, and the adults reading to them. The book is due out February 2012, but you can pre-order it now from Amazon. Do it now so you don't forget.

The under-ten crowd might miss the satire (New Age parents and chain restaurants come in for a lot of goosing; and couples will recognize themselves in the happily married, if long-suffering, Bunnies). But the non-stop silliness is equal opportunity fun. Madeline's parents have been kidnapped by foxes running a rabbit by-products factory; she hires Mr. and Mrs. Bunny to track them down. Half the joke is that Mr. and Mrs. Bunny--who wear fedoras and drive a Smart car--are kindly but incompetent. When a very stupid marmot (named The Marmot) is added to the mix the tangles increase exponentially.

The Marmot Question
Just how stupid is that marmot? Well, for starters, he uses a card printed with a precious secret code to wipe his bottom, then flushes it down the toilet. Horvath knows how to take a good joke and keep drawing it out. The Marmot asks Madeline to call him "The," his first name, but Madeline finds this impossibly confusing. "Listen," she says, "can I call you something else? Don't you have a nickname?"