Hop Little Bunnies, quality the lift-the-flap with cuteness aplomb

When is a board book not a board book? When the book is much bigger than those whom it might be compared to and its pages are just a bit thinner. That sounds like a riddle and by could fit almost any book by that definition. However, some books have the same vibe, similar footprint and will be magnetically attractive to those late crawlers through pre-K kids. Hop Little Bunnies is this kind of book and it’s based on the song that you’re probably humming right now. The content is aimed at ages 3-6, but those ages are too big for board books. Granted, they’d benefit by reading them, but their pre-k pride knows that the aforementioned books are for babies and they’re big kids. 

To bridge that gap, Hop Little Bunnies has durable lift-the-flaps on pages that are thick and able to withstand small hands whose coordination isn’t as delicate as it will become. The lift-the-flaps are also made from thick, poster board paper. On every other page there are flaps that move, revealing the same ridiculously cute farm animals that are on the front of the flaps. The difference, a la, a softer version of Flip-O-Rama from Captain Underpants is that the cute animals are doing something different.  

They might be awake and stretching when the cats were otherwise sleeping. The bunnies are slowly getting off of their mat, when they were otherwise sleeping or the ducks might be quacking when they were otherwise sleeping.  

It’s not that the animals are lazy. Hop Little Bunnies tells a story where the bunnies are woken up because they have to wake up the rest of the animals. They and all of the animals do so happily until the last two pages when they’re all dancing. The final page features a full page lift-the-flap where readers will see all of the animals, except for a rabbit or two, sleeping.  

Hop Little Bunnies is a fun, durable book that will certainly last a couple of years and go through one or two children in the same family easily. The pages are stronger than you’d expect them to be and the flaps, which are normally the first to fail in a book like this, are strong and difficult to separate from the main page.  

Granted, the book’s construction means nothing if the book isn’t cute. The illustrations by Laura Hughes are engaging and present the farm in corner to corner color. The text by Martha Mumford has rhymes where you’d expect them in succinct prose that readers will engage those younger book fans to sleep or until they want to spend some alone time with the book.  You can even download a Hop Little Bunnies activity set from Bloomsbury.

There are affiliate links in this post, because, bunnies.