Book #22 of 2024: The Remarkable Rescue at Milkweed Meadow (and 1 DNF)

[thistlechaser]

The Remarkable Rescue at Milkweed Meadow by Elaine Dimopoulos.

Quick synopsis: A young rabbit quietly struggles against her family's rules to make friends and to help others.

Plot: Butternut is born to a family of storytelling rabbits. Her "grandmother" had been a pet of humans, and so learned about the worth of storytelling. Once she got free, she taught her children and then their children the value of telling stories.

Butternut is a scared young rabbit. Her head is full of "brambles" (fears) instead of "milkweed" (smarts). But once she makes friends with a newly fledged robin chick (Piper), the two do more than anyone would expect.

The climax of the story comes when the pair has to save a litter of orphaned newborn coyote puppies. They rally all the animals of the meadow to succeed.

Writing/editing: This is an "early middle grade" book, and the writing showed. Very simple, very short chapters. Very short book overall. That's not to say it was bad, but the short length of the chapters was noticeable.

For as simple as the writing was, there was some interesting worldbuilding going on as well (like how robins get their names).

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Because the story was so simple and uneventful, I almost DNFed it early on. The whole book was only a couple hours of reading time though, so I stuck it out, and by the end I was glad I had.

The animal characters were completely realistically animals. Though they did talk, everything else about them was perfectly animal. In other words, this is the exact kind of "talking animal" book I like.

It was really a quiet story though. What conflict and tension there was was more on a personal level than any world-changing stuff (which makes sense, since the main character is "just" a rabbit).

The only thing I disliked was the art style. Every couple chapters there was picture, but the style didn't work for me at all (it was even less good than the cover art). Since this book was published by Random House, this really surprised me.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. 4 stars.


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DNF #15: Into the Bright Unknown (The Gold Seer Trilogy #3) by Rae Carson. Basically a heist movie in book form. So very different than book #1 that I loved so much. This book was boring as heck and way too preachy. I stuck with it to the 56% point, but I couldn't force myself to finish it.

Comments

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

the one with rabbits sounds cute and sweet!

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I think you'd like it. A nice, quick read.