![]() ![]() 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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