Rabbit Hill

Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson is a gentle animal story for 8 year olds about a hillside of hungry creatures waiting to find out what sort of people are moving in.

What happens

The Big House has been empty for years. The garden has gone to weeds, the tool house has been picked clean, and last winter was the worst anyone can remember.

Then word goes round. New Folks coming.

But are they planting Folks? That's the only question anyone on the Hill actually cares about.

Everybody has an opinion. Porkey the Woodchuck wants clover. The Red Buck wants tomatoes. Phewie the Skunk doesn't care about the garden at all, because what he's looking forward to is the bins.

Most of the story sits in one rabbit family. Father talks like a Southern gentleman and can't stop mentioning the Bluegrass Country he came from (everyone else has heard quite enough about the Bluegrass Country). Mother worries, then finds something new to worry about. Little Georgie is sent to fetch elderly Uncle Analdas, and on the way he makes up a song and jumps a stream nobody has ever jumped.

That's the real pleasure of it. You're listening in on neighbours. They gossip, they show off, they get offended, they take a nap and ask someone to keep watch for them.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that these animals talk about danger the way farm animals would. Mother lists dogs, traps, poisons and guns in one anxious breath. Father names eight grandchildren lost to cats, in passing, as a lesson in staying alert. Nothing happens on the page, but it's said plainly, and a child who has just started thinking about what happens to small animals may stop and ask you.

The bigger thing is the language. This was written in America in 1944 and it sounds like it. Father speaks in long, formal sentences. Porkey and Uncle Analdas talk in thick dialect, full of "dingblasted" and "figgerin' figgers". A passing description of skunks in "solemn Indian file" reads badly now. A confident reader will enjoy doing the voices. A child still building reading stamina will want you alongside.

What to read next

If your reader takes to a farmyard of characters who all have something to say, Charlotte's Web is in the library too. It opens with Fern arguing her father out of killing a runt piglet, then moves out to the barn, where the animals have their own arrangements and their own worries about what the people intend.