The Runaway Bunny

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd, 1942.

A little bunny tells his mother that he’s thinking about running away, but his mother assures him that, no matter where he goes or what he does, she would always come after him because he’s her little bunny, and she loves him.

The pictures where the little bunny talks about all of his ideas for running away and evading his mother and where his mother explains what she would do to follow him are in black-and-white.

However, there are large, full color pictures after each of these sections showing what would happen as the mother follows her little bunny.

The little bunny’s plans for running away become increasingly imaginative and outlandish, from going up a mountain and joining the circus to transforming himself into a fish, a bird, or a sailboat.

No matter what the little bunny thinks of for running away and changing himself into something else, his mother assures him that she would find a way to come after him and be there for him. In the end, the little bunny decides that he might as well stay with his mother, just as they are.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

This is a very well-known and much-loved book about parental love and the lengths that parents will go for their children. The mother bunny is determined to be there for her child, even when the child wants to run away. We don’t know why the little bunny was talking about running away from his mother, and without that, it seems just like the little bunny was just trying to provoke his mother to find out how much his mother loves him. When she tells him all the things she would do to reach him if he ran away, he seems reassured and content to remain her little bunny.

This book was originally published during WWII and is a calm and reassuring story that probably comforted many children living through unsettling times. It has never been out of print since its original publication.

The author and illustrator of this book also later wrote and illustrated Goodnight Moon. The scene where the little bunny imagines himself as a boy in a house and his mother says that she would still be his mother reminds me of the illustrations in that book, and I wonder if the mother and child rabbits in that book came from this one.