Lord of the Rabbits

Some places are older than the people who find them. Some secrets are worth keeping forever.

When nine-year-old Pip Warren is sent to spend the summer at his grandmother's farm, he isn't expecting much. Things at home have become what grown-ups call complicated, and eight weeks feels like a very long time. He finds a house that needs painting, a chicken named Harriet with strong opinions about everything, and a long gravel lane that makes sneaking impossible.

He also finds a gap in a fence.

Beyond the gap is a meadow unlike the fields around it - full and loose and growing however it wants to, with ancient oak trees and wildflowers in colors he doesn't know the names of and a quality of quiet that means lots of things are happening, just carefully. And in the middle of it, sitting in a patch of open ground with the unhurried stillness of something that belongs there absolutely, is a rabbit with one white ear.

Thatch is the Lord of the Rabbits - forty-third in an unbroken line stretching back three hundred years, keeper of the Great Warren's records, guardian of two hundred and fourteen rabbits living in tunnels that follow the roots of ancient oak trees deep into the earth. He has been watching the farm for some time. He has been hoping for exactly the right person.

But something is coming. Thatch can feel it the way you feel a change in the air before rain, and he cannot read it fully from inside the Warren. He needs someone who can move through the world above ground, who can read the signs he cannot reach. Someone who came back early. Someone who sat quietly. Someone who, when a rabbit said good morning, fell off a root and then, once the surprise had passed, introduced himself properly.

When yellow survey stakes begin appearing at the meadow's southern edge - hard plastic yellow, the kind that doesn't occur in nature - Pip and Thatch must find a way to work together across the boundary of their two worlds. Pip has his grandmother's careful wisdom, a film camera, and the patience he has been quietly developing all summer. The Warren has three centuries of knowing how to survive what looks unsurvivable.

And somewhere in the back of a farmhouse study, in a cardboard box that hasn't been opened in decades, is a piece of paper left by a great-grandmother Pip never met - a woman named Clara who sat in this same meadow sixty years ago, paid attention, and acted carefully. Just like him.

Along the way, Pip meets Briar - the fastest rabbit in the Warren, the most reluctant to trust him, and eventually the truest friend he finds that summer. He learns about the Council and its members: Dock, who has reservations about everything and states them clearly before setting them aside; Fern, who feels things too large for quiet; and Moss, who reinforces tunnel walls whenever he is worried, which is his way of agreeing to anything. He watches two hundred and fourteen rabbits run the boundary of their meadow at dusk in near-silence, saying in the only language that matters: we are still here, we know the shape of what we are protecting.

And on his last evening in the meadow, he learns the word the Warren has kept since before its oldest records. The word for the rare and particular person who sees them truly and acts without being asked.

The Lord of the Rabbits is a story about belonging to something longer than yourself. About what it means to protect a place the way a place deserves to be protected. About the courage it takes to sit still, and the extraordinary things that happen when you do.

Perfect for readers ages 8 to 12, and for anyone who has ever felt the pull of a place that seemed to be waiting for them.