Bartholomew the Adventurer Series by Tom Hoffman

ASIN moved from less recent edition"...A fine work of Visionary Fiction...""...The Alchemist meets The Hobbit, but with rabbits..."Sent to the Cavern of Silence by his servant Parfello, Bartholomew Rabbit begins a quest to find the mysterious Great Gem. He is aided along the way by the Tree of Eyes, the nefarious Skeezle Brothers, and his new best friend Oliver T. Rabbit, a renowned scientist working for the Excelsior Electro-Vacuumator Corporation... moreASIN moved from less recent edition"...A fine work of Visionary Fiction...""...The Alchemist meets The Hobbit, but with rabbits..."Sent to the Cavern of Silence by his servant Parfello, Bartholomew Rabbit begins a quest to find the mysterious Great Gem. He is aided along the way by the Tree of Eyes, the nefarious Skeezle Brothers, and his new best friend Oliver T. Rabbit, a renowned scientist working for the Excelsior Electro-Vacuumator Corporation. As Bartholomew’s self-awareness and magical shaping skills grow, his quest transforms to a search for his dearest childhood friend, Clara Rabbit. To save Clara from certain death, he must defeat the evil and powerful Zoran the Emerald Shaper, wearer of the dreaded Tenth Ring.From The Eleventh Ring:“Blindly reaching out for his bottle of Madame Beffy’s Headache Tonic, he knocked over a vase filled with glass marbles. They fell to the floor with a great clatter. As he watched them bouncing and skittering across the stone tiles, he had an unexpected thought. The wild, chaotic path of the marbles was not really chaotic at all. Each marble was precisely following the known laws of physical motion. He was not witnessing chaos, but order and perfection. Each marble was exactly where it should be at every moment in time.” less

"An endlessly stimulating sequel that caters to intellectually fearless readers." –Kirkus ReviewsOliver T. Rabbit develops a revolutionary new invention and Edmund the Rabbiton develops an inexplicable new phobia.  When Edmund unwittingly opens an interdimensional doorway, Bartholomew, Oliver, and Edmund are pulled into the strange world of Nirriim... more"An endlessly stimulating sequel that caters to intellectually fearless readers." –Kirkus ReviewsOliver T. Rabbit develops a revolutionary new invention and Edmund the Rabbiton develops an inexplicable new phobia.  When Edmund unwittingly opens an interdimensional doorway, Bartholomew, Oliver, and Edmund are pulled into the strange world of Nirriim.  Edmund encounters the enigmatic thirteen Blue Monks, Master Singers of Nirriim and relives a life changing traumatic event which occurred fifteen hundred years ago during the Anarkkian Wars. With help from Ennzarr the Red Monk, the eerie Blue Spectre, and two unlikely treasure hunters named Thunder and Lightning, the three adventurers must find the lost Seventh Key and defeat the inconceivably powerful Wyrme of Deth or be trapped forever in the world of Nirriim.Excerpt from The Thirteenth Monk:“Edmund, I am the Thirteenth Monk, and I am going to tell you a story that may help you understand the true nature of the song we will sing for you. When you hear the story it may sound familiar to you, as though you have heard it before, perhaps a very long time ago when you were young, or even before then.” Edmund closed his eyes, listening to the calm, soothing voice of the Thirteenth Monk.“There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the sandy beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one,” he would say, “we see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find order and perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, “Ah, it was all worth it.”The Blue Monk stood up. “We will sing for you now, Edmund. It is the ocean’s wordless song of incomparable beauty. It is the song of the universe, the song of your past, the song of your future, the song of life.”Edmund’s eyes were still closed when he heard the first Blue Monk sing. less