A Better Best Friend

A red squirrel chances on a ‘best friend,’ Pock, a Penny Bun mushroom. They take some time to become best friends, but they have the ‘very best times’, and ‘even bad times are good times with a best friend,’ the squirrel asserts: so  the woodland year progresses, However with spring comes a little bug called Moo, and doubt creeps in: ‘I’m starting to wonder if Moo isn’t a better best friend than my best friend Pock.’ Moo brings new skills and sows doubt in the squirrel’s mind. And then Gunther the mouse arrives…

Tallec has a great skill in conveying emotion in the unlikely faces of mushrooms and mice, and the text captures the dilemma the squirrel faces in direct language, looking at the difficulties of forming friendships (none of them are immediately to be seen as extroverts, a further complication an adult sharing the book might explore), and how one might categorise a best friend: ‘I want ONE best friend. Not two!’ As autumn returns, Tallec’s woodland psychogeography shows the little squirrel forlorn amid wind-tossed trees, and with Gunther joining the group there is a comic, anthropomorphic resolution and a deliciously understated final line: The (Better) End.

So much to talk about with children about rivalries, our needs for friends: how is this end ‘better’? How does the squirrel feel? What about his first best friend, Pock the mushroom? The faces, although comic and expressive, give little away, leaving room for speculation and discussion.

Complex friendships are hard to write about whether we are thinking of YA fiction or stories for younger children, and here the reader is faced with a big question: can we have more than one best friend? This is an issue to be thought over a great deal – and this is a book which raises the complex issues without giving the reader (or any age) a flat, definitive answer.