Mayor Bunny’s Chocolate Town

I was lucky enough to see an early copy of this in exchange for an honest review. All views and opinions are my own.

I’m so thrilled to be rounding up the Mayor Bunny’s Chocolate Town Blog Tour today!

Mr Bunny’s Chocolate Town by Elys Dolan, published by Oxford Children’s

Mr Bunny is back . . . and this time he’s running for mayor. Coop Town needs some urgent repairs and Mr Bunny is promising to make it great again.

At first, the chicken electorate is wowed by Mr Bunny’s promises of new chocolate houses, new chocolate parks, new chocolate swimming pools-as well as his bold claim that chocolate will repel hungry foxes.
But what will happen when the truth comes home to roost?

We’re pretty new to Mr Bunny, but I was on board straight away. There’s so much to love here and what I loved best was how broad the appeal is here.

This is a book which, for the very littlest readers (or those just wanting to kick back, relax and enjoy!), can be read and taken purely at face value – a delightfully colourful and silly story with chickens in bikinis, a very bossy bunny, and chocolate, CHOCOLATE, CHOCOLATE!!

Slightly older readers will be able to talk about who they’d vote for (and why!), Mr Bunny’s interesting campaign tactics – whether it’s OK to lie to get something we want, whether we should do something we’ve promised to even if we no longer want to etc – or what they’d do if they were Debbie going up against him (I’m imagining some kick ass kid campaigns here!)

Digging a bit deeper still, there’s some brilliant conversations to be had with older children about morality, politics, fake news and democracy and the parallels we can draw with ‘real life’.

Which all makes this sound rather heavy for a picture book, doesn’t it?! Luckily, there’s fart jokes, wise-cracking chickens, chocolate hats and some very interesting attire to lighten the mood and keep everyone laughing!

And by everyone I mean everyone, repeatedly, because with lots of ‘goings on in the background’, signs, speech bubbles and visual humour there’s something for all ages, including those of us tasked with reading it on repeat day on, day out (and you will be!) – my own personal favourite involves a surprised remark about a very large egg in the opening pages…

But what I also love about this is its appropriately impartial in tone. As readers, we all know Mr Bunny is in the wrong, but we’re never told as much, which is very clever and makes for a much more interesting, enjoyable read.

This is a brilliant read for home, but I’d like to suggest that it’d be even better as a whole school book project – there’s just so much meat on its chocolatey bones and so many things it could lead to from debate, drawing and dialogue to poster making, persuasive texts and pictures to character work, cartoons and c(h)ocolate!!

However you decide to read it, just make sure you do! And don’t miss out on the other stops on the blog tour from earlier this week!