Paint Your Own Easter Bunny Book

A variation of this review is at my blog here.
This is a lovely book. I became a Horvath fan years ago with The Trolls and quite liked Everything on a Waffle. This one has the same episodic quality of these and feels a bit gentler too, somehow. It takes place in an unnamed Massachusetts town where the narrator, 12 year-old Jane, lives with her poet mother and younger siblings in a beach house. It is indeed a series of "adventures" that have a number of connecting threads (family, fathers, friendship, and more). There is a charm about this book and I recommend it highly.

Horvath always has a dry, deadpan humorous style that I've always loved. For example, in this book, at one point Jane mentions that her mother has a large stockpile of rice and there are other references to the fact that money and food are a bit scarce in their household. In a later chapter they are sitting about mourning the death of another character and that rice is elegantly referenced thus:

We don't feel much like having a barbecue now. We sit around and eat a little rice.

(And again a few paragraphs later when someone stops by to discuss the funeral.)

"Of course we will be there. We will all be there," says my mother and then offers Mrs. Merriweather a little rice, but she cannot stay. She has other arrangements to make.

There is something in this book that lingers with you. At least it sure is lingering with me.