Reading Maurice Sendak’s Ten Little Rabbits was an odd experience. I read it eagerly, because, you know, Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are. Pure greatness that makes me sigh.
On the other hand, there’s the reality of Ten Little Rabbits. According to NPR, this was published as a small pamphlet in 1970, and not published in its current form until 2024, 12 years after Sendak died. This is a pleasant little counting book, almost all images, with a few numbers and fewer words. A child magician walks onto the page, dressed in a snazzy suit, and magics a rabbit into existence on the pedestal beside him. The number 1 appears below.
The next page he creates/summons another, and there’s a 2. This progression continues through 10. As more and more rabbits appear, the magician gets more and more irritated, and less and less visible. His body language and expressions evoke his emotions without words, as does the rabbit-driven chaos, and so, he makes the rabbits vanish, one at a time, counting down to “None.” At that point, he’s “All done.” And so is the book.
The drawings are much simpler and plainer than those in Where the Wild Things Are, and there is not really a plot. This is a counting book that counts up to 10 and back down to zero, and gives a bit of a motive for the subtraction practice. That’s relatively rare in counting books, but otherwise, this seems very basic compared to Where the Wild Things Are.
There are no flaws here, and I have no criticisms, really…but my expectations led me to expect much more.
