Book Review: "Watership Down"

Watership Down by Richard Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



An entertaining summer read! If you've read and enjoyed Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, you'd enjoy this one too.

It's hard not to admire the rabbits described in the book. With only a few exceptions, they are all loyal to and caring about their community; they are compassionate, cooperative, considerate, tenacious in face of hardships and creative in their struggles to survive. Living under constant stress and circumstantial perils, these vulnerable creatures never give up hope for a better tomorrow.

"Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass."

Richard Adams declares that he drew much information about rabbits from R. M. Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit.

Being one born in the Year of the Rabbit, I have a natural liking for rabbits.




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