Vice President Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte wrote—and his wife, Karen, illustrated—a children’s book about the family bunny Marlon Bundo. It’s not Beatrix Potter or Watership Down. But it’s on time for the Easter theme, charmingly illustrated, and needless to say well-intentioned. Who doesn’t love well-intentioned books about bunnies? HBO’s John Oliver apparently. He and his team published a bunny book to troll—and, as it would happen, to outsell—the Pences’.
Charlotte and Karen’s Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President hops through business as usual for BOTUS, whose work, we learn, does actually not include hardheaded policy meetings on the dangers of animal testing or responding to crises like the mysterious mass poisoning of a bunch of bunnies in Vegas last month. Whereas, in John Oliver’s send-up A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo we learn that some bunnies are gay.
Oliver’s book was released Sunday, one day before the Pences’, and had sold out altogether by Tuesday (a second printing is in the works). Charlotte, for her part, doesn’t seem to mind: When asked about Oliver’s book during a Fox Business appearance Tuesday, she said that since proceeds from both books go to charity, “I’m all for it, really.”
More useful, though, to the reader who asks for a little more from a bunny book—say, that its relevance outlast a Trump-era news cycle—is the fact that these two conflicting reads on Bundo’s day join a rich tradition. They remind us to revisit the long-eared and twitchy-nosed literary lapin, just in time for spring…
1. Watership Down
Richard Adams’ opus, first published in 1974, has everything. It’s a quest to find a new home—featuring fearsome bloody battles; a wealth of natural detail; convincing authority in its adventuresome hero, Hazel, his clairvoyant righthand and their band of trusty fellows; and its own vaguely Welsh-seeming language. (“Tharn” means a fear that freezes you in your tracks.) It’s also a 426-page epic entirely about rabbits. To his credit, Adams shakes off attributions of mythic or religious allegory and says the book’s success stems from his having set out simply to amuse his daughters in the car. Luckily for us, they were driving through rabbit country. Adams, who died in 2016, said in one of his final interviews that children’s literature ought to be scary and exciting; a new miniseries adaptation of his most famous work, now in production, aims to diminish the tale’s thrills and terrors.
2. The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Easily the world’s best-known bunny bandit, Peter Rabbit may be adorable but he also braved the threat of being. baked. in. a. pie. when he stole carrots and cabbage from Mr. McGregor’s garden. Beatrix Potter, who first dreamed him up to amuse her former governess’s son was a delightful storyteller but also and uncommonly talented naturalist with a keen commercial instinct. Peter, in his trademark blue coat, became the first actually trademarked literary doll to be mass-produced and sold. First by self-publishing Peter’s inaugural Tale in 1901, then by sewing and selling the first blue-coated plush herself, Potter pioneered popular affection for bunny lit—a tradition which has vastly multiplied, much like rabbits themselves, ever since.
3. The Runaway Bunny
The picture book by Margaret Wise Brown—in which a mother rabbit tells her restive child how she’ll find him, whether he becomes a bird, a fish, or a sailboat—illustrates boundless devotion with an unforgettable sweetness and subtle, somehow natural magic. It’s been convincingly called a theological allegory. But the details of Brown’s own life tell us she was a bit of a “runaway bunny” herself. (And, if you’d ever doubt a classic children’s book’s timeless relevance to adult life, consider its profound use in the play Wit as a parable about God’s unfailing search for a dying woman’s soul.)
4. The House at Pooh Corner
A.A. Milne’s Rabbit, in this and other volumes, fancies himself a leader and power connector within the Hundred Acre Wood. Attempts to organize his friends reliably go awry, with politically relevant life lessons along the way (if you’re into that sort of thing). In a chapter commonly invoked as an admonition against xenophobia, Rabbit plots to subdue Tigger’s new and foreign personality, to “unbounce” him: “‘Well, I’ve got an idea,’ said Rabbit, ‘and here it is. We take Tigger for a long explore, somewhere where he’s never been, and we lose him there, and next morning we find him again, and—mark my words—he’ll be a different Tigger altogether.’” (In the end, as you might expect, it’s Rabbit who gets lost and found again.)
5. The Velveteen Rabbit
Margery William’s rather dark story of a plush rabbit turned real after his forced cremation is worth revisiting if only in that, like The Runaway Bunny, it’s also got a deeper meaning concerned with the power of love to overcome earthly limitations. Love—and in the case of the much-loved Velveteen Rabbit, loss—makes its object real. Plus, with William Nicholson’s original drawings, it’s just a gorgeous book.
6. Marshmallow
Clare Turlay Newberry tells the story of a pet rabbit (Marshmallow) and the cat whose apartment life it’s intruded upon learning to get along. The book boasts Newberry’s charcoal illustrations of both and “A Poem in Praise of Rabbits,” which is perfect:
7. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s fantasia is timid and deadline-driven, just what you’d expect of a prey species. But he’s also come to symbolize that curious enticement to slip along toward an alternate plane of consciousness, thanks in part to the stylings of Grace Slick.
8. Emily Ruskovich’s essay-ode to Watership Down
The Paris Review has a “Revisited” series, and Ruskovich’s entry includes the most honest reflection on rabbit husbandry I’ve ever encountered. Ruskovich recalls a throbbing cut from a rabbit bite, and describes the peculiar quietness of the rabbit who rests nearby while she writes: “She expresses her emotions with subtlety. She likes the sound of my fingers tapping the keys. She chatters her teeth to purr—I can’t hear the chatter, but I can feel the vibration when I pet her forehead.”
9. Voyage to the Bunny Planet
In this series of stories by Rosemary Wells, sad and lonely children—depicted as anthropomorphized rabbits, technically based on Wells’ pet Westies—are transported from a bad day to the Bunny Planet: “Far beyond the moon and stars, / Twenty light-years south of Mars, / Spins the gentle Bunny Planet / And the Bunny Queen is Janet.” There, each gets to live the happy day that should have been. My lifelong favorite is Robert, a brown rabbit with round glasses, who’s beset by boisterous cousins and just wants to be alone. On the Bunny Planet, he snacks on toasted tangerines and rests in a sunny secluded forest, where nobody bothers him.
10. Benjamin Franklin’s letter to his nephew
Rosemary Wells uses a quote from Franklin as an epigraph is good advice for sad and lonely children of all ages. In a 1771 attempt to cheer up his nephew, Benjamin Franklin described a trippy daydream: “It is the first duty of a flagging spirit to seek renewal in the latitudes of whimsy. I, for one, dream on beyond the five planets to a world without wickedness; verdant, mild, and populated by amiable lapins.” In a world where even books about bunnies—literary vehicles for adventure, imagination, and love—fall prey to political gamesmanship, we might all wish to wander between worlds as Franklin did.
