by Moe Zilla

Created on: June 12, 2010

It's one of the first times I've seen a children's picture book with a glossary. It defines Monsieur as "Mister" and tres as "very" (though it doesn't tell readers where Provence is). It's a picture book with more text than usual, and there's several paragraphs on nearly every page. It gets off to a slow start, describing a small cafe known as the Spinach Main. But on page four, the two rabbits sit on its terrace drinking their mineral water - and reminisce about their days as pirates.

Six years later, in 2005, Carolyn Crimi wrote another book about pirate rabbits - "Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies." It's interesting to compare the two books, since in the end they're very different. Crimi's child-bunny reads lots of books, and through a cartoonish turn of events convinces the other pirates that they're useful. But in "Rabbit Pirates: A Tale of the Spinach Main," Judy Cox offers grown-up rabbits with a long and complicated personal history.

"The battle of  Tortuga, was it not…? It was there that you had the good fortune to be rescued by me."

It's weird that the story is told in a flashback, since that seems to rob it of some of its drama. But what's even stranger is this book isn't really about pirate adventures at all. The rabbits have long since gone into the restaurant business together, and their biggest problem now is a fox who stalks them when they're harvesting their vegetable garden. They exercise laudable restraint in resisting the temptation to fight the fox by, say, challenging him to an exciting sword fight. But truth be told, that probably would've made this a more swashbuckling story.

The glossary defines a lot of other French words used in the story, le dejeuner (lunch), minuit (midnight), and aubergines (eggplant). But it left me wondering why Judy Cox had insisted on writing such a complicated story at all. She has a master's degree in elementary education, according to the book's jacket, and has been teaching elementary school for more than 10 years. It seems like at some point she'd ask herself whether she was making things too complicated for young readers.

That said, there's some interesting pictures by illustrator Emily Arnold McCully. She uses impressionistic watercolors to capture the hazy memories of the two rabbit friends - and the peacefulness of their new gardening life. The book's title page features a lovely drawing of the sunny villa where the story takes place. But there's only two pictures that actually show acts of rabbit piracy - and I think readers will disappointed that there aren't more.

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