"One day, Emily Brown and Stanley were launching themselves into outer space to look for alien life-forms when there was a rat-a-tat tat! at the kitchen door..."
Stanley is just Emily's gray stuffed rabbit toy, of course. But then again, there's also a rocket ship in the middle of Emily's kitchen, and she's imagining both herself and Stanley dressed up in spacesuits (carrying the helmets underneath their arms). So in Emily's imagination, Stanley is alive and very precious. Which is good, because the knock at the door is from "the Chief Footman to the Queen," who wants to buy Stanley away from Emily - in exchange for a solid gold teddy bear!
"That Rabbit Belongs to Emilty Brown" is a very imaginative story by Cressida Cowell. Turn the page, and Emily and Stanley are racing their motorcycles across the Sahara Desert - which conveniently has a garden door so that Emily can hear another knock. "It was the army," Cowell explains, and a captain announces that "her most royal highness" now wants to up her offer by throwing in ten talking dolls with the solid-gold teddy bear. Emily turns him down, and a few days later imagines herself swimming in Australia's Great Barrier Reef - when there's another knock on the door, this time from "the Navy."
But the wild tone of the story matches the zany illustrations by Neal Layton. Sometimes he switches to a collage style, blending his simple sketches of Emily with real photographs of a rocket launching pad, for example, or adding pictures of tropical fish and the colorful blue-tinted rocks of an undersea coral reef. His "anything goes" style follows the far reach of Emily's imagination. He even uses real fabric to create the texture of Emily's old, grey rabbit. And he's obviously got a sense of humor from the name plate he creates for the beginning of the book.
"This 'That Rabbit' Book Belongs To..."
Emily stands up to the Navy just as firmly as she stands up to the Army. And then Layton contributes a breath-taking illustration of Emily dangling high above a jungle of tropical trees (which Cowell's text identified as the Amazon rain forest). Nevertheless, there's still a garden door which Layton draws into the corner of the picture - and through it comes the Air Force! Emily rebuffs their enhanced offer for the rabbit, but towards the end of the book, her rabbit is stolen by a fourth branch of the military called "The Queen's Special Commandos." But fortunately, her imagination will lead her to a happy ending.
And a lesson about how much fun you can have with a toy!