LET'S MAKE RABBITS

A mite of a fable, this time, about a rabbit drawn by a pencil and a rabbit cut out of scraps of patterned paper by a pair of scissors. ""Immediately the two rabbits were the best of friends. But it wasn't long before they were hungry."" So they call to the pencil and the scissors, who each provide a carrot--respectively, drawn and cut out. But when the two rabbits are hungry again, the pencil and the scissors don't appear; instead, a big orange carrot turns up--""real,"" says the scissors rabbit, because ""It has a shadow!"" And when they've gobbled down the carrot, they have shadows, they're real too. The book will probably satisfy, even delight, very small children; but the illustrations are, for Lionni, mundane--while the text is so perfunctory as to induce less emotional involvement than the situation allows for. (This is not, in short, another Little Blue and Little Yellow.)