Among NBM’s recent offerings is A Home for Mr. Easter (200 6x8-inch pages, b/w; paperback, $13.99) by Booke A. Allen, a feel-good tale about an overweight, perhaps a little mentally retarded girl named Tesana, who, bullied by her classmates, invents a unicorn friend and, later, takes into her care a rabbit, which she is convinced is the Easter Bunny. Tesana decides to return Mr. Easter to his “home,” wherever that may be, and for the next 150 pages, she makes a heroic attempt to find it, beset by numerous threatening situations — a greedy pet store operator who, persuaded that Mr. Easter is magic, wants to keep him; a bunch of college students who use rabbits as experimental animals; protestors against lab animals; and a con-man magician who may have “owned” Mr. Easter in some previous enterprise.
By the end of the book, after numerous hazardous adventures, Tesana finds a home for Mr. Easter — her own home with her vaguely uncomprehending mother, where Mr. Easter, freshly hatched out of a lately acquired egg, promises to live with her ever after, happily. Allen applies a splashy brush to good effect, giving the headlong pace of the narrative a harried appearance.
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