Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit

A chatty rabbit dares you to solve how he keeps escaping his hutch in this whimsical detective story perfect for reading aloud with animal lovers ages 5 to 9.

When Joãozinho the rabbit scrunches his nose 15,000 times, he finally comes up with an escape plan!

Joãozinho is an ordinary rabbit, happy and hungry. Ideas come to rabbits when they scrunch and unscrunch their noses, but as anyone who has seen a rabbit knows, they do this nonstop. In order to sniff out one single idea, they have to scrunch their noses 15,000 times. Joãozinho comes up with an idea as good as the smell of a fresh carrot. He's finally figured out how to escape from his rabbit hutch in order to find more food. Joãozinho soon becomes an escape artist—but how does he do it? That's a mystery he dares you to solve.

Clarice Lispector, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, wrote this story for her son Paulo, a lover of rabbits when he was small and, as she writes in her introductory note, “had yet to discover stronger affections.”

Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959. She died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.

Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009, and he has translated multiple works of fiction by Lispector, including The Hour of the Star and her Complete Stories. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. His latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Kammal Joáo is an artist, illustrator, and art teacher from Brazil. He also wrote and illustrated the book O tempo sem tempo.