Three's A Crowd? My New Friend Is So Fun! by Mo Willems

"HI, GERALD!"

"HI, SNAKE! HAVE YOU SEEN PIGGIE?"

It turns out that Snake has just seen Piggie. She is playing with Brian Bat.

At first, Gerald is cool with that.

"BRIAN IS NICE," HE SAYS.

Snake agrees. After all, Brian is his best friend.  What's not to like?

Except as a little time goes by, Snake and Elephant start to think about the implications of their best friends getting chummy.  Maybe a bit too chummy.  Gerald wonders if they are having way too much fun with each other.  Snake gets the picture. Gerald's trunk is at half mast, and Snake is feeling, well, lower than a snake's bellybutton.

"IF THEY ARE HAVING THAT MUCH FUN TOGETHER, THEN...

maybe they do not need us...."

Gerald and Snake look at each other in horror.  Could they be losing their best best friends as they speak? They set off to find Piggie and Brian Bat and find them giggling together and announcing that they are playing... best friend games! They have been drawing pictures of their best friends. Do Snake and Gerald want to see what they have drawn?

This is seriously scary. Gerald covers his eyes. Snake points out that he can't even do that!

Is this the end of two lovely friendships?

Mo Willems' latest in his estimable early reader series gets into the scary flip-side of the BFF syndrome, the potential loss of that one-and-only best-best friend, in his new My New Friend Is So Fun! (An Elephant and Piggie Book) (Hyperion, 2014). Luckily for his fictional characters and his loyal readers, the best-buddy pictures that Piggie and Brian have drawn are of their long-term friends, Gerald and Snake!

Not all such situations have such an amiable ending, with everybody happy, but Willems can't be faulted too much for not taking on that serious social situation in 32 pages and a few dozen words of dialogue. In his expressive portrayal of the anguish on his cartoon characters faces, he certainly foreshadows the fear of losing a friend to a "better" new friend, leaving that story for the moment to other authors, as his joyous pairs look forward to foursome fun together. In this new book Willems continues to provide delightful beginning reader fare while showing how friendship evolves between his two unlikely best buddies.