Michaela Kolofsky

But really, Chris, I wanted to ask you a bit more about the rabbits.

Talk a bit, if you can, about their ethos.

How do you think the rabbits are different to humans in the way they think about the world in this book?

That's a very good point.

Who did you think the rabbits were supposed to represent?

You know, you've tapped into something.

There's a great deal of racism towards the rabbits in the book.

That's really at the heart of the story.

And it's like a hit parade of racist tropes, isn't it?

You know, all the stuff about if we let rabbits into our village, soon we won't be speaking English anymore and they'll litter bomb us and they'll overpopulate us and every town will smell like lettuce and so on and so on.

Why do you think he was using satire to talk about racism in this way?

I mean, satire is a great tool for talking about serious things.

He is very good and he's masterful in just a few, even in a few sentences, he describes new rabbit characters and you get a very strong sense of who they are and where they'd stand on issues.

And, you know, 15 pages before that, he'd only just been introduced to this world where there are rabbits running around or walking around, as the case may be.

But it's the very interesting point you raise about having trouble reading the book.

I did wonder kind of who the book was for.

You know, in your mind, it's interesting you say...

that if the book was is for someone who who is kind of a racist maybe it's a wake-up call for them because i also found that if if you're reading the book and you've as you've described you've already lived with racism as part of your daily experience i found the book in that way wonderful but sort of repetitive

I knew some of the things he was describing about racism and discrimination firsthand, but the rest of it, it sounded like it was not unintentionally kind of a little bit heavy handed.

But let's stick with the actual world of the book for a moment.