Prolific and much-lauded writer-illustrator Mo Willems
has created several popular series, including the Pigeon books and the
Elephant and Piggie books, but his Knuffle Bunny trilogy holds an
unusual place in his canon because it is best read in order. Each book
finds the main character, Trixie, at a different stage of her childhood,
with her world expanding considerably each time. In the first book,
she remains in her neighborhood and interacts only with her parents,
and she takes her first plunge into comprehensible speech. In the second,
she has mastered verbal communication and spends her days at preschool
among other children her age, eventually making her first close friend
outside the family. In the third book, she is a confident elementary
school student off on an international voyage to see her grandparents.
From a trip to the Laundromat to a trip to Holland, her adventures are
steadily getting bigger.
Trixie remains just as attached to
Knuffle Bunny, her dowdy stuffed rabbit, as she was in the first volume,
so of course, she brings him along with her for the big trip, counting
on having him to cuddle with during her very first airplane flight.
Unfortunately, as anyone who has read the first two books knows, she’s
not so skilled at hanging on to her treasured toy. On this occasion, she
won’t be able to instantly retrieve him; she leaves him behind on the
plane, and by the time she realizes what she’s done, the plane is gone,
and Knuffle Bunny is off for a voyage around the world. Will she ever
see him again? And how will she get along without him in the meantime?
Willems
once remarked in an interview that the word Knuffle is an adaptation of
Knuffel, the Dutch word for snuggle, so it seems quite fitting that the
last book should find Trixie in Holland, snuggling with her Oma and Opa
in her beloved bunny’s absence. Most of the book takes place there,
which makes it educational for children as well as entertaining. As with
the previous books, this is a mixed-media effort, with black-and-white
photographs serving as backgrounds for colorful hand-drawn characters.
Kids can wander the Dutch streets with Trixie as she eats at a café and
poses in front of an authentic windmill, and they can gasp along with
her at the garish pink Dutch-spouting robo-bunny her grandparents buy
her in an effort to ease her malaise at losing Knuffle Bunny, seemingly
for good this time.
Additionally, in a four-page fold-out
spread, Willems offers a peek at some of the other places Knuffle Bunny
might end up in his travels, showing him in eight very different
locations. I wish that Willems had identified these places in a note in
the back, but kids can still have fun trying to figure out what country
they are seeing; it just might take a little more work for parents to
confirm the accuracy of their guesses.
While all three books
contain a mix of the humorous and the emotionally resonant, I would say
that the first book is primarily funny, while the second is equally
touching and comical. I would deem the third book the least funny of the
three and the most poignant. We don’t know precisely how old Trixie is
here; I would guess at least seven, and possibly as old as ten. She’s
old enough to have a real awareness of how her life is changing, and
that scares and saddens her. However, it also excited her, and by the
end of the book, she has come to embrace the new possibilities that come
with being a big kid.
Most of the pages in this book have a
beige background, and while a few characters are drawn directly on the
page, most are set within a photographic panel, with a majority of pages
having between one and three. As always, Willems does a lot with a
little. One of my favorite parts of this book is the series of panels in
which Trixie, having realized that her bunny is gone, heads off to
inform her father, who is busy enjoying a pleasant chat with his dad, a
charming fellow with a thick gray beard, square spectacles and a bald
head. In four pictures, we see him go from relaxed to on-edge to staring
at Trixie to assuming a hopeless face-palm position. “Trixie didn’t
tell her daddy that Knuffle Bunny was gone,” Willems writes. “She didn’t
have to.” This is especially striking given that the central conflict
of the first book hinges on Trixie’s inability to communicate with her
dad and his obliviousness to the source of her distress. Just as Trixie
is growing up, her dad is maturing as a father and learning to be more
attuned to his daughter.
Like the first two books, Knuffle Bunny Free,
a sweet, heart-tugging play on words, includes an epilogue, and this
one drives home the fact that the Knuffle Bunny series will end with
number three. I’ll admit I got a little teary as I read those last four
pages, which are written directly to the real Trixie as Willems imagines
what the next decade or two may hold in store for her. The book proper
also ends with a letter, leaving the reader with a real sense of the
power that words have to connect people. Perhaps children who read this
may be inspired to begin correspondences of their own: with their
grandparents, with each other, with distant pen pals they have yet to
meet. They might even decide to write the author himself, which he
encourages by posting his mailing address in the FAQ section of his
website, www.mowillems.com.
The Knuffle Bunny trilogy is the
continuing story of a pudgy plush rabbit that is always getting lost.
It’s the story of two adults, especially one overwhelmed dad, learning
how to be better parents. But mostly, it’s the story of Trixie, a girl
who is gradually growing older and taller and wiser and kinder. The
first two are pretty much unavoidable; the second two are just a shade
easier to achieve when children read such edifying books as Mo Willems’
Knuffle Bunny series.
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