Elephant & Piggie Books: All 25 in Order, Ranked and Reviewed

Hey, Story Seekers!

There are twenty-five Elephant & Piggie books.

Twenty-five.

If you've just discovered them, or a kid in your house has, that number is not helpful. The covers all look alike. The titles all sound alike. And the library has eleven of them, none of which are numbered on the spine.

So here's the whole series, in order, with what readers actually think of each one and which ones won awards.

Readit has appointed himself series consultant. He has opinions about Gerald.

What Elephant & Piggie Actually Is

Two friends.

Gerald is an elephant. He worries. He thinks things through, usually past the point of usefulness, and he is almost always sure something is about to go wrong.

Piggie is a pig. She does not worry. She has an idea and she is already doing it.

That's the engine. Every book in the series is those two temperatures colliding over something small.

Mo Willems wrote and drew all twenty-five, between 2007 and 2016. They are early readers, which usually means joyless, and these are the opposite.

Here's why they work, and it's structural.

There is no narrator. Not a shortened one. Not a quiet one. None. Kirkus put it plainly reviewing the first pair: "the text is entirely comprised of dialogue." Every word in an Elephant & Piggie book comes out of one of their mouths.

The pages are nearly empty. Again from Kirkus: "Uncluttered pages feature the two main characters against clean white space." No scenery to decode. Nothing to distract a kid who is working hard to read at all.

The speech balloons are color-coded. They're "rendered in softly colored word balloons (pink for Piggie, gray for Elephant)." A child who cannot yet track who is speaking in a block of text can track it by color instantly.

Put those three together and you get something unusual: a book a beginning reader can genuinely perform.

Where to Start

Not with book one.

I know that's annoying advice. Start with We Are in a Book!, number thirteen.

It is the highest-rated book in the series by a wide margin, 4.53 across nearly 19,000 Goodreads ratings, which is more ratings than any other title including the first. That is not an accident of shelving. That is people going out of their way.

It's also the one where Gerald and Piggie notice they are being read. By you. Right now. A kid figuring out that the characters know the reader exists is a moment you get to watch happen on their face.

If your kid is brand new to reading and you want the simplest possible entry, Today I Will Fly! is book one and is genuinely the beginning of the friendship. We reviewed it here. Fair warning, and this comes up in the reviews: Gerald is noticeably crabbier in book one than he ever is again. One reader's daughter decided he was simply "having a bad day."

If you want the one that will make a room of kids groan and then laugh, it's Waiting Is Not Easy! Piggie has a surprise. Gerald has to wait for it. That's the entire book, and it is very funny.

The Award Winners

The American Library Association gives the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award to the best American book for beginning readers each year. Elephant & Piggie took it twice and was named an Honor book five years running.

Seven of the twenty-five. That's the shortlist if you only ever read a handful:

• There Is a Bird on Your Head!, Geisel Medal, 2008
• Are You Ready to Play Outside?, Geisel Medal, 2009
• We Are in a Book!, Geisel Honor, 2011
• I Broke My Trunk!, Geisel Honor, 2012
• Let's Go for a Drive!, Geisel Honor, 2013
• A Big Guy Took My Ball!, Geisel Honor, 2014
• Waiting Is Not Easy!, Geisel Honor, 2015

Worth noticing: the two that won the actual medal are not the two readers rate highest. There Is a Bird on Your Head! sits at 4.40 and Are You Ready to Play Outside? at 4.38, while four non-medal books rate above both.

Committees and families are measuring different things, and both are right.

All 25, In Order

Ratings pulled from Goodreads. The highlighted rows are the four that readers rate above 4.42.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Here's the thing nobody tells you about these books.

You're supposed to do them out loud, with somebody else.

Because there's no narrator, there is no neutral voice for the grown-up to hide behind. You are either Gerald or you are Piggie. So hand one of them to the kid.

That's not my clever idea. It's what families already do. One reader described their routine exactly: "As always, our oldest reads Gerald's dialogue and I read Piggie's dialogue (plus any extras)."

A teacher went further. "Room 108 LOVED this book. We chose it as our Literacy Week Book! We decorated our door to look just like the front cover of this book and are working on a readers Theatre production to perform for other students."

Readers theater. Out of a sixty-four-page early reader with maybe two hundred words in it.

That tells you what Willems actually built. These aren't books about two characters. They're scripts for two people.

And that changes what reading practice feels like. A kid slogging through a leveled reader is performing a task. A kid doing Piggie's lines while you do Gerald's is in a show. Same words. Completely different afternoon.

Give Gerald a low, worried voice. Give Piggie a fast, delighted one. Take the bad part on purpose, because Gerald gets all the reaction faces and kids love watching a grown-up panic.

One more thing I'd tell a parent.

They're short. Really short. That is the point, not a shortcoming. A child can finish an entire book in one sitting and feel like a reader by dinner, which is worth more than a longer book they abandon on page nine.

Readit's Review

Piggie is better.

I said it.

Gerald spends the whole time worrying about stuff that mostly turns out fine.

But that IS funny, so I guess he's doing his job.

My favorite thing is that you can read one in like four minutes. So you can read six.

And you should get the one where they know they're in a book, because that made me feel weird in a good way.

Also, if somebody else reads Gerald, you should make them do the face.

You know the face.

The one where his eyes go enormous and his trunk droops and he is clearly about to have a problem.

If they won't do the face, get a different grown-up.

For Teachers and Librarians

Twenty-five titles, all written and illustrated by Mo Willems, published 2007 to 2016. Sixty-four pages each, and Kirkus files them as easy readers for ages 4 to 8.

What makes them unusually useful in a classroom is the same thing that makes them fun: no narrator, so every book is a two-part script. They work for paired reading, buddy reading, fluency and expression practice, and readers theater with almost no preparation. The color-coded balloons do the part-assignment for you.

The series average across all twenty-five is 4.39 on Goodreads, from roughly 195,000 ratings. There isn't a weak one. The lowest-rated in the whole run is Elephants Cannot Dance! at 4.30, which would be a strong showing for most books.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs, as a series

Individual books land differently. Some are quietly sweet. Some are built entirely around one joke and land it perfectly.

But the series as a whole earns a strong 4, and it earns it the hard way: with timing, faces, and a friendship where one character is always about to be proven wrong.

The fifth one I'm holding back because the comedy is deliberately small-scale. Willems is doing precision work, not chaos. That's a compliment and a score at the same time.

Final Explorer Verdict

If there's a kid in your house between about four and eight who is starting to read, these are as good as early readers get.

Start with We Are in a Book!

Read them out loud, in parts, with somebody doing Gerald badly.

Don't worry about order. They aren't a story with a plot running through them. They're twenty-five short visits with the same two friends, and you can drop in anywhere.

And when your kid starts making characters talk after the book is closed, which they will, that urge has somewhere to go. How To Make Your Sock Talk is my beginner's guide to ventriloquism for ages 5 to 10, and it teaches the actual skill. Piggie gets a speech balloon. Your sock gets a voice.

Gerald would like it on record that this could go badly.

Piggie has already started.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit