One Runaway Rabbit
David Metzenthen (Illust: Mairead Murphy)
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781760523558
Awards Year: 2020
Category: The Book of the Year: Early Childhood

The dark and moody front cover draws the reader into this book, while the back cover shows the same scene from behind the rabbit, which is clever and interesting. The sparse text combines with the illustrations to weave a tale of curiosity and adventure with a dash of humour and suspense. With no more than three words on a page, and some pages text free, young pre and beginning readers will delight in reading this story independently. The use of this repeated three-word structure makes the text highly effective and encourages young readers to use visual literacy and explore the illustrations, adding their own narrative elements to the story. The night setting provides an atmospheric backdrop, adding to the intrigue of a curious rabbit, Lulu, on a suburban adventure. The highly detailed pencil sketches (digitally coloured) are full double-page spreads to immerse the reader in Lulu's adventures, adding to the overall high-quality design of the book. The endpapers provide a bird's eye view of Lulu's journey giving the story a complete beginning and end.