If you made a Venn Diagram of the longest books I read as a pre-teen and the books I reread the most, this one would be smack dab in the middle. I've read it at least five times, which is a lot for me, and listened to the audiobook more than once on family road trips.Despite the fact that the story is deeply silly on the face of it (a bunch of rabbits move from one field to another... wow, what an adventure...), it's actually pretty thrilling. A soothsaying crazy rabbit has visions of a rabbit den awash in blood and strange monsters (machines) attacking the land. A few believers follow him to found a new warren. Along the way, they fall in with and are tempted by a few other tribes of bunnies, each twisted in its own weird way (including the common trope of the false paradise, where everything is apparently "taken care of" for the rabbits by mysterious outside forces, which Justin Cronin totally ripped off in The Passage), before they eventually determine to start anew. Woven throughout is a whole language and mythology for the rabbits, including a sort of creation myth, that I always found a little boring when I was younger but appreciated more when I picked it up a few years ago -- they give the proceedings an additional layer of allegory and keep it from being just a cute kid's story (which, don't get me wrong, it still mostly is).Because yes, it does work on an allegorical level, but it's really only worth analyzing as such if you're in middle school, since the allegories are pretty obvious and not very deep (quiz question: what political system/real world figure is represented by the rabbit colony Efrafra and its tyrannical leader, General Woundwart? Is it Stalin? It's Stalin, isn't it?). Better to appreciate it as a great adventure with endearing characters and an interesting pseudo-mythology. Unless you're a girl, because all the female rabbits are super lame.Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 20: Book you've read the most number of times.
