Monday 26 September 2016

My Dead Bunny


I'd never really heard of this book before it appeared in the CBCA Award Shortlist 2016 earlier this year. I was intrigued by the title, My Dead Bunny. It's certainly not a typical picture book title. But then My Dead Bunny is not a typical picture book. This is no bedtime read for little kids. This is a zombie story in picture book format for older kids.
My dead bunny's name is Brad;
His odour is extremely bad.
He visits me when I'm in bed,
But Bradley wasn't always dead ....
I just loved the rhyming zombie text- a picture book first? I can't be sure. Zombies aren't really my usual genre.

Sigi Cohen is a new name in Aussie children's books. Sigi is a West Australian lawyer with a degree in English literature and a fondness for rhyming text. He's certainly hit his stride with this first outing. Zombie bunnies is genius. And it's funny. I hope there's more books to come from Sigi, I'm certainly looking forward to them.

Illustrator James Foley has written a fabulous series of blog posts about the horror movies he used as inspiration for his fabulous illustrations for My Dead Bunny. Even I got The Shining references, but The Walking Dead is beyond my ken. I really love learning about the background stuff that illustrators use, their thoughts, inspirations and visual references.

Teacher Notes

2 comments:

Brona said...

I should have known there were Walking Dead influences at play here! It actually makes me like this book a little more.

I haven't been a fan of this at all, but as the weeks in the build up to Book Week happened last month, I can tell you that this book got lots of 7-9 yr old kids quite excited.

And that's what counts - when your target audience loves what you do :-)

Louise said...

I don't know Walking Dead at all, so had to have it explained to me. I can see it appealing very much to the target audience, and I loved it too. It's great fun.