Credit: Robin Mitchell Cranfield.

Blessed is the parent whose child is a curious omnivore, ready to sample any dish placed before them. Those children exist, but they are rare.

More common are children who, like the young bunny at the centre of award-winning B.C. author-illustrator Robin Mitchell Cranfield’s empathetic and slyly humorous new picture book, Carrots Make Me Suspicious, draw a line in the alimentary sand. For Cranfield’s unnamed bunny, the verboten food happens to be one most commonly associated with its species. “At lunch there is a fresh carrot on my plate,” the bunny tells us. “But I do not eat carrots.” Why carrots in particular? The bunny doesn’t have a good answer, only that they seem suspicious. The bunny’s mother suggests they investigate the dreaded vegetable, so they do, first making a list of known carrot properties (aside from their taste: the bunny does not eat carrots, remember), then seeing how they grow in the wild, and finally looking up carrot-based recipes. The recipes finally break the ban: with their dad, they make a cinnamon carrot soup, which turns out to be delicious and not at all suspicious.

Cranfield’s previous picture book, Wings, Waves and Webs, introduced very young children to visual patterns by showing where they appear in the natural world. The pencil-and-ink illustrations of her new book are less central to the overall concept, playing more of a supporting role. The colours are muted, and the images of the bunny and their family look almost like they were made with sidewalk chalk.

The core of this book is Cranfield’s decision not to have the parents or anyone else harass the bunny into trying carrots, à la Green Eggs and Ham, but to let them work through their own suspicions and perform various tests until they are ready to take a bite. Cranfield underlines this important element by including a few quiet moments of parental patience: even when the bunny wants to bail on a party because there are only carrots on offer, there are no rolled eyes or exasperated sighs, just wordless support. This is an ideal pick for independent-minded young readers and for caregivers who prefer to nudge rather than push.