But this tale transcends neighborhood parochialism. With Trixie’s scruffy, laundry-duty dad and pixie-haired mom, Willems has done for picture books what Dan Zanes did for kiddie music, bringing a hipster veneer to the form.
She dreamed of how Knuffle Bunny would make them feel better.” “She dreamed of all the children Knuffle Bunny would meet. “She dreamed of Knuffle Bunny and all the places he would visit,” Willems writes. Text is spare, and detail and context are reduced to the essential emotional experiences of the characters.īut whereas the first two “Knuffle” books captured the homey, sidewalk-chalk charm of Trixie’s brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood, here we see the world and the lives of others, both in Holland and in Trixie’s imaginings of the lost bunny’s global escapades.Ī foldout spread depicts the soaring bunny bobbing through images of India, Mongolia and London while Trixie sleeps. The story is again relayed through the distinctive juxtaposition of photographs and ink drawings. Once more, the beloved bunny is separated from its fretful owner, this time on an airplane to Holland to visit Trixie’s grandparents. Yes, Willems has brought Trixie’s saga to its inevitable end. Now, in “Knuffle Bunny Free,” we find Trixie confident and backpack-clad, and watch as she lets Knuffle go. We trembled when Trixie lost Knuffle in the first book and commiserated when she confronted Knuffle’s limitations in the second. In the first two installments of his best-selling series, “Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale” and “Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” both Caldecott Honor books, Willems introduced readers to Trixie, who first as a pre-verbal toddler and then as a feisty preschooler navigated her Brooklyn neighborhood with Knuffle Bunny in tow - and then not. And it is one of Mo Willems’s many achievements to be, if not the first, then certainly the best author to present the dread heartbreak of the lost stuffed animal - in this case a certain beloved Knuffle Bunny. One of the great picture-book traditions is to offer up a worst-case scenario (“There’s a Nightmare in My Closet” springs to mind), then allow children to resolve it through the simultaneous intimacy and remove of storytelling.
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