The Velveteen Rabbit
by Margery Williams
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Publisher: HarperTrophy
Salesrank: 14352
Released: 1999-03-09List Price: $3.99
Our Price: $1.01
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Media: Book
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Customer Reviews:
The Velveteen Rabbit (2008-03-28)
I was very happy with the book. Although it was small it was a wonderful addition. I ordered for friends as well.Not the author’s best work (2008-02-25)
I give this book two stars for its excellent diction and a few amusing bits of description, but I find it painfully sentimental, like Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.” I have never understood why this story with its abstract “The Boy” protagonist is kept available while the same author’s delightful masterpiece, “Poor Cecco,” is long out of print and valued by book dealers mainly for its wonderful Arthur Rackham illustrations. In contrast to the sadness of the Velveteen Rabbit, the tale of Poor Cecco the wooden dog, his fellow residents of the nursery toy cupboard, and an amusing cast of human and animal supporting characters - all with distinctive personalities - and their droll adventures at home and on the road, is a treasure replete with mystery, surprises, and an elegantly natural style. I was lucky to be given it as a child and wish others could be so fortunate.
Perfect! (2008-01-30)
This copy was everything I hoped for. The illustrations are glossy and from the original edition I had as a child. The text is a little larger than normal, making it kid-friendly. The pages are tinted a light brown, which gives the book a nice “classic” feeling. I highly recommend it!Sublime (2008-01-15)
Having a seven year old niece, I realize just how pandering and how uninspired most children’s books seem to be in light of the Velveteen Rabbit. Never saccharine or insipid; the Velveteen Rabbit is filled with love, humanity and such tenderness that it still grabs you as an adult as an enduringly wise tale that never loses its power. I gave this to my niece to read and felt like it challenged her to not only read something that hones her linguistic skills but entertains so truly and uniquely. The world could learn so much from this little book about what it means to be “real” and what it means to love unselfishly.The standard by which all stories are judged. (2007-11-04)
When I first sat down to write “O’Shaughnessey,” it was to “The Velveteen Rabbit” that I turned for inspiration, not that I wished to copy it; it served as an ideal to which I aspired. “The world needs more books like this one,” I thought. How well I accomplished the task is up to others to judge, but Margery Williams’ 1922 classic continues to be the standard, for me, by which other children’s stories are judged. There is a sweetness to the story, and great wisdom spoken gently so as to be not so much understood but felt.
The bare bones of the plot are really quite simple. A stuffed rabbit made of humble velveteen, who is made to sit because its legs didn’t really work, is made to feel useless and insignificant by newer and more sophisticated toys. He finds a friend in the oldest toy in the nursery, a skin horse, worn and threadbare, who tells the rabbit that all those superior toys will remain toys and never be real. The horse tells him that only the love of a child can make him real. “Real isn’t how you are made,” the Skin Horse says, “it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time…” This is the crux of the book.
At a time when most toys are mass produced by huge conglomerate corporations using focus groups to determine whether a toy is real or not, the truth of a simple hand-made toy eclipsing them all is refreshing.
Quite by accident, the rabbit becomes the boy’s favorite toy and his fur gets rubbed off and his tail gets pulled loose, and he realizes that the skin horse was right: becoming real often means “most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and get loose in the joints and very shabby, but … once you are real, you can’t be ugly…” And, when the boy declares him real, not a toy, he bursts with joy!
But, when he meets two real live rabbits in the garden, animals who laugh at him because he can’t jump, has no hind legs, and isn’t real, he becomes disheartened again. He is real to the boy, of course, but he longs to be able to jump and dance like live rabbits.
When the boy falls ill with the scarlet fever, the rabbit is doomed. Because he and the boy were inseparable, he is to be burned because he is filled with germs. He is packed into a sack with all the other things the boy had touched and taken to the garden. It is there that the Nursery Magic Fairy comes to him and makes him real at last. “I take care of all the playthings that children have loved. When they are old and worn … I come and take them away and turn them into Real.”
I gave this book to my daughter on her ninth birthday and will probably give it to my grand-children as well. It was the 1983 publication with illustrations by Allen Atkinson that I gave her. When first published, “The Velveteen Rabbit” was sparsely illustrated with simple but evocative line drawings. It has gone through many different versions with different illustrators, but to me, Atkinson’s watercolor renderings are without equal. He is able, with a few strokes, to capture the most subtle of emotions, and the colors are rich and luminous.
It is a book that should be read to them early and often. It’s lessons are universal and it’s story gentle and compelling. No child should be without it.
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