Watership Down

For years the only thing I knew about Watership Down was that it had rabbits. I'd seen it referred to here and there as "the rabbit book", but I never heard any more details. This, coupled with the fact that most people seemed to really enjoy it convinced me that I should eventually read it.

I went into it expecting a children's book. And while the plot is pretty straight-forward and the language at a basic level, this book was way longer than I was expecting from something written for a younger audience. I'm a little surprised it wasn't, or hasn't been, broken up into several installments.

Watership Down follows a group of rabbits on their search for a new home after their old one is destroyed to make way for some sort of development. They have adventures along the way and actually end up finding a likely spot much more quickly than I expected. But then they run into other problems. Mainly that they'll never really survive if they don't get some female rabbits to come join them (the lack of females seriously bugged me for a good long while before it was finally addressed).

So then they're off to find other rabbits and ask them to come live with them. They discover a dystopian rabbit warren where overcrowding is a serious problem, but the jealous leader refuses to let anyone leave. So there's a daring escape and a thrilling pursuit, and really the book gets a lot more exciting and interesting in the back half when there's an actual villain to thwart.

I'm not sure I love this book as much as others, but I think that's mostly because I came to it later in life. When the bunnies aren't going to win me over just by being bunnies and some of the flaws are a bit more apparent and jarring. Still it was a fun adventure. The author has a habit of going off on descriptive tangents, which I found either beautiful and poignant or annoying and long depending on what else was happening in the story at that point. There's some great stuff here, and it's definitely worth reading or giving to your favorite 11-year-old.

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