Cress Watercress

Gregory Maguire's Cress Watercress is a warm, funny animal story for 9 year olds about a young rabbit whose family has to start again in a dead oak tree full of nosy neighbours.

What happens

Papa went out one night to fetch honey and ginger root, and he didn't come back. Mama fears the worst. So she packs up the warren and sets off by moonlight with Cress and baby Kip, to a basement flat she's never even seen.

The building is an old oak called the Broken Arms. The landlord is Mr Owl, who can't see a thing but hears absolutely everything (make a note of it!). The rent is ten moths a night. Upstairs there's a grumpy old mouse with a cane and a cigar, a squirrel family with four very wild boys, and two songbirds who tell everybody everything.

Cress is lovely company. She's brave and a bit dreamy (she decides the moon must have "eaten some stars for breakfast"). She also keeps looking for Papa in every shadow, which is heartbreaking and very true to life.

It's properly funny too. The neighbours are brilliant characters, bossy and nosy and kind underneath. Baby Kip mostly says about three words, and one of them is Rotty, his stuffed carrot.

When Mama sneaks out alone at night to raid a beehive, Cress follows her. She ends up nose to nose with Tunk the Honeybear, who wears a necklace of dead bees. Her answer is to tell him she's a spirit of the forest. (He very nearly believes her!)

It's a sad place to start, and the book doesn't pretend otherwise. Papa is gone before the story begins and nobody knows what happened to him. A fox trots past with a hen in its jaws. Moths die in candle wax to pay the rent. If your reader is tender about a missing parent, it might be one to read together for the first few chapters.

For most children, though, it's the neighbours that stay with them. Who wouldn't want Mr Owl for a landlord?

What to read next

If they love a rabbit family looking for somewhere safe to live, Watership Down is the big classic. It's a much longer and wilder journey, but it starts in the same place, with a small, nervous rabbit sure that something is wrong with home.