Battle Bunny by Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett

Hey, Story Seekers!

Somebody has written all over this book.

Crossed out words.

Added explosions.

Gave the bunny an eye patch.

There's even a note from Grandma inside, and that didn't stop him.

I believe we have a suspect.

Battle Bunny is written by Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett and illustrated by Matt Myers. Except that is not quite what it wants to look like.

It wants to look like somebody handed a kid named Alex a painfully sweet old picture book called Birthday Bunny, and Alex decided the situation required a pencil.

If you're new to Book Explorers, I'm Jungle Jimmy the Book Explorer, children's author, dad, and longtime performer for kids. Readit the Book Worm is my childlike expedition partner. He has been staring at these pages trying to work out which marks were already there and which ones Alex added.

That's the book.

And that's exactly why I wanted it for third grade.

Book Breakdown

Underneath all the pencil destruction is Birthday Bunny.

Birthday Bunny wakes up on his birthday. His forest friends seem to have forgotten his special day. There are feelings. There are wholesome little woodland animals. There is a lesson waiting patiently at the end.

Alex has other plans.

Simon & Schuster sets it up nicely: his grandma found the book at a garage sale, Alex isn't interested, and then he decides to make it something he'd actually want to read.

So he starts crossing out pieces of the printed story and replacing them with his own words.

Birthday Bunny becomes Battle Bunny.

The innocent forest adventure becomes a supersecret mission to unleash an evil plan.

Matt Myers's gentle, old-fashioned woodland paintings get invaded by Alex's penciled additions. Bunny gets the eye patch and the weapons. Other animals become fighters. Machines, explosions, danger and general destruction appear wherever Alex can squeeze them in.

The original book never completely disappears.

That's the whole trick.

You can still see enough of Birthday Bunny underneath to understand what Alex changed. So you aren't reading one story, and you aren't quite reading two.

You're watching a kid turn Story A into Story B while Story A is still sitting there protesting.

Eventually Alex himself has to enter the action, because Battle Bunny's plan has gotten out of hand and Alex is the only one who can stop it.

That seems fair.

You made him, Alex.

You deal with him.

For teachers and librarians: Simon & Schuster publishes the 32-page edition for grades K to 4, ages 5 to 9, with a Lexile of AD480L that the publisher states is certified by MetaMetrics. One honest note: TeachingBooks currently shows 540L for the same book. I'm using the publisher's certified figure and telling you the sources disagree rather than splitting the difference, which would produce a number nobody published. The AD means adult directed.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

This is precisely why I didn't want a third-grade shelf to become fifteen chapter books lined up by page count.

A third grader can do things with this picture book that a younger kid can't.

You have to notice the editing.

Not just read it.

Notice it.

Which letters did Alex add? Which words did he cross out? What did the sentence originally mean? What does it mean now? What did Myers actually paint, and what did Alex supposedly draw on top of it?

The joke lives in the difference between those two things.

And Myers has the hardest job in the entire operation, because his illustrations have to convince you that two completely different artists worked on this book.

The underlying Birthday Bunny pictures are soft, old-fashioned oil paintings on pages made to look aged. Then Alex's pencil comes barging across them with scribbles, additions, weapons, labels, machines and assorted bad decisions.

If that second layer looked too polished, the whole thing collapses.

It has to look like a kid took over the book.

Scieszka and Barnett are playing the same game with the words. They had to write a deliberately syrupy original that could still be hacked into something completely different, which is a much harder piece of writing than it looks.

Here's what I find genuinely useful about it.

Alex isn't creating on a blank sheet of paper.

He's reacting.

"This story isn't for me."

Fine.

What would make it yours?

Apparently the answer involves robot killer bees.

Now, I would not turn a third-grade classroom loose with pencils and a stack of library books. Your librarian will have thoughts, and they will be correct.

But photocopied pages? Discarded material? Something made for the activity?

Now we're talking.

Change one word.

Add one picture.

Turn the hero into the villain.

See how far you can bend a story before it becomes a different story.

That's a writing lesson kids might accidentally enjoy, which is the only kind that sticks.

Readit's Review

Okay, I want to do this.

Not to THIS book.

I know.

But I want somebody to give me a boring book so I can fix it.

Battle Bunny has an eye patch, bombs, a saw and robot killer bees, and he knows 1,104 fighting styles.

How do you even learn 1,104?

I don't think I could name 14.

Also you have to look everywhere, because Alex drew stuff on top of the regular pictures.

Sometimes I was trying to read the crossed-out part first, because I wanted to know what the book said before he wrecked it.

Then you read what he changed it into.

That's like getting the before picture and the after picture at the same time.

I would read it twice.

The second time I'd just look for stuff I missed.

And I am NOT drawing in a library book.

You don't have to keep saying that.

What Others Think

That rereading instinct Readit just had turns out to be the main thing readers report.

Goodreads has Battle Bunny at 4.10 out of 5 from 3,590 ratings and 659 reviews, and the recurring positive reaction is people going back through the pages because there are alterations and visual jokes they missed the first time.

One reviewer handed it to her tween son after reading it herself. He immediately reread it, and then the two of them went back through the artwork together hunting for jokes they'd both missed.

Another tried something I especially like. He read the competing stories himself first, then had children split the job: one read Birthday Bunny aloud while another read Alex's Battle Bunny alterations. He reported kids pointing details out to each other and enjoying untangling the two versions.

That's a classroom activity sitting right there in a reader review.

Not everybody finds the design easy. One reader said plainly that following two stories at once can confuse children who aren't used to that kind of reading. Another objected to the volume of cartoon weaponry.

Both are fair, and I'd repeat them to a parent.

This book is intentionally messy, and it is intentionally full of kid-drawn battle nonsense. If either of those is a problem in your house, this isn't the one.

The professional reviewers largely embraced the experiment. Kirkus highlighted how Myers's old-fashioned paintings stay visible underneath the penciled changes and recommended the concept as inspiration for children's own writing. Booklist and School Library Journal both starred it, with SLJ pointing it at independent readers looking for something different.

That's where I land too.

The mess is the activity.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

The central joke is terrific.

Take the sweetest bunny story you can imagine, hand it to a kid with a pencil, and watch him turn it into an action movie.

Myers keeps feeding that joke visually. There's always another alteration to find, and the escalating destruction gives kids real reason to go back through the pages.

So why not a five?

Because this one makes me grin and inspect more than it makes me laugh out loud. A lot of the pleasure is the click of realizing how cleverly a sentence or a painting has been turned inside out.

That's a discovery pleasure, and it's a good one. It just isn't the same thing as a room coming apart.

A very good four.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd hand Battle Bunny to third graders who like visual jokes, kids who draw all over their own notebooks, reluctant readers who enjoy unconventional books, young writers, and readers who have started noticing that books themselves can play tricks.

Younger children can enjoy it too. But third grade is where I particularly want it.

By then a lot of kids are strong enough readers to compare the original sentence against Alex's altered version, instead of just following whichever words jump out first. They're old enough to appreciate how the joke is built.

Which makes this 32-page picture book surprisingly busy.

You read it.

You inspect it.

Then you go backward, because you're fairly sure Alex drew something in a corner that you missed.

If your kid likes this kind of trouble, Jon Scieszka has form: The Stinky Cheese Man takes the book itself apart, and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! does the same job to a story everybody thinks they already know.

And if what lands is the pictures arguing with the words, that's the engine I built Look! There Are No Dinos Inside Of This Book on. Dangerous Dave insists there are no dinosaurs. The pictures disagree with him on every page.

Alex attacks the book from outside.

Dave gets contradicted from inside.

Same pleasure either way: the kid knows more than the page is admitting.

Eventually somebody is going to ask for a pencil.

Give them some paper first.

Trust me on that one.

Until our next expedition, keep exploring those books.

Jungle Jimmy & Readit