THUNDER BUNNY

Thunder Bunny, the youngest bunny in the bunch, came “out of the blue,” as her own granny states, and is the color of the sky on a clear spring day. Different from her brown siblings, she begins to search for answers to her uniqueness, finally concluding, “I came from the sky.” With a “jump on the wind,” she is carried through a thunderstorm up to the sun and moon, returning back to the meadow not “only a bunny now . . . a sun and moon bunny, / clear and true out of the blue.” Thunder Bunny has physically changed with a glorious yellow halo on her chest, signifying . . . what? Berger leaves a very open-ended situation in this bizarre, esoteric story, which provides an inexplicable and unsatisfying conclusion to a common theme of sporting self-confidence and self-esteem in spite of being different. Berger’s beautifully soft pastels on torn and cut paper add a pleasing aesthetic quality, but on the whole, the reader is left as baffled as the bunnies with mama exclaiming, “Oh, my.” (Picture book. 4-6)