By Du Bose Heyward
A little brown country bunny, mother of twenty-one, is told she'll never be one of the five Easter Bunnies — and then earns it.
Cottontail is a plain little brown bunny who wants one thing: to grow up and be one of the five Easter Bunnies. The big white bunnies and the fast jackrabbits laugh at her — a country nobody, they say — and then she has twenty-one babies, which everyone agrees settles the matter for good. But when old Grandfather Bunny needs to choose a new Easter Bunny, he watches how Cottontail has raised all twenty-one to be kind and clever and helpful, and he picks her: wise, swift, and good. Her last delivery of the night is the hardest one, a chocolate egg for a sick child at the top of a tall, cold, dark mountain. She climbs it when she has nothing left in her, and earns a pair of little gold shoes.
This is one to keep. It was written in 1939 and it still catches people off guard: the hero is a girl bunny and the mother of a big family, chosen not despite all that but because raising twenty-one little ones made her capable and kind. Marjorie Flack's paintings are warm and old-fashioned in the best way. It's longer and richer than most Easter picture books, so it holds up to being read several springs running, and a four-year-old and an eight-year-old will each find something different in it.