Rating: 
Summary: Award winner? Yes. Great book? No.
Review: Winner of the Caldecott Medal for best illustrated American children's book. "My Friend Rabbit" is a good looking, but curiously unengaging book for children. Certainly, it has nice woodblock-style illustrations with saturated colors, but the book suffers from failing to be a good read. It has few words, instead relying primarily on images to tell the story of an unlucky rabbit and his mouse friend that he launches in an airplane ...which inevitably gets stranded in a tree. How the rabbit solves the dilemma of the stuck plane piloted by his tiny buddy gives the story its humor.Despite the accolades, books like this suffer from not being a great bedtime read since the narrative is so reliant on the images. And though it is driven by pictures, the story has enough words to make it the kind of book that very young children can't follow completely by merely looking at the illustrations. The illustrations are also an issue. While they are clever and well done, I personally do not believe that this was the best illustrated book for children this year. Normally. there is little to debate when it comes to the Caldecott winners and runners-up, but as someone who goes through many children's books with my son, I simply do not agree with the Caldecott jury. There are many excellent children's books that marry a great story with outstanding graphics. I found "My Friend Rabbit" to be lacking in the story itself. There is just not much there. My toddler son, who usually responds well to great books by asking for me to read them over and over, never asked for me to read this book more than once. Nor did he pick it up on his own to look at the pictures. There was not enough in the book to hold his interest. Ultimately, that's the best review of all. Disappointing.
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