Today I Will Fly! by Mo Willems

Hey, Story Seekers!

Piggie has made an announcement.

Today she will fly.

Gerald the elephant has reviewed the situation.

Piggie is a pig.

Gerald sees a problem.

Today I Will Fly!, written and illustrated by Mo Willems, is the first Elephant & Piggie book, which means this is where one of children's books' funniest friendships first gets its shoes on.

Or wings.

No wings, actually.

That's the problem.

Readit would like Gerald to stop announcing that something is impossible before Piggie has even had a chance to do something ridiculous.

That seems fair.

Book Breakdown

Piggie is going to fly.

Not someday.

Today.

Gerald knows better.

Pigs don't fly.

Case closed.

Piggie has apparently not received the memo.

Her first attempt involves running, jumping, flapping, and a whole lot of determination.

It does not involve flying.

Gerald points this out.

Piggie calls it a practice flight.

I like her already.

Then a dog gets involved. Piggie ends up briefly airborne and is thrilled about it.

Gerald remains annoyingly committed to facts.

That was not flying.

So Piggie goes looking for help.

Eventually a duck provides it, and Piggie gets into the air with an assist. She's flying.

Well.

She's being helped to fly.

Piggie is perfectly fine with this distinction.

And that's one of the things I enjoy about the story. Piggie's goal doesn't change just because the method does. She never decides success only counts if she did every part of it alone.

Gerald, meanwhile, gets pulled along emotionally. He begins as the voice of absolute certainty.

You cannot fly.

By the end, Piggie's success has put a dangerous little idea into his enormous elephant head.

Maybe he could fly too.

Uh-oh.

Willems draws all of this with almost nothing cluttering the pages. Kirkus described it exactly: "Uncluttered pages feature the two main characters against clean white space." No scenery. No decorative furniture. No suspicious squirrel wandering around behind them.

Just two characters talking. In fact, as Kirkus also noted, "the text is entirely comprised of dialogue." There is no narrator anywhere in this book.

That puts tremendous pressure on faces and bodies.

Good thing Willems knows what he's doing.

Gerald's eyes widen. His trunk moves. His whole body seems capable of worrying. Piggie bounces around with precisely the opposite energy.

Even the speech balloons tell you who's talking. They're "rendered in softly colored word balloons (pink for Piggie, gray for Elephant)," which is a quietly brilliant piece of design for a kid who is still learning to track dialogue.

It's simple enough for an emerging reader to follow.

It's also, structurally, a two-person comedy routine.

For teachers and librarians: Hyperion, 2007. Sixty-four pages, and Kirkus files it as an easy reader for ages 4 to 8. This is the first of twenty-five Elephant & Piggie books.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Give me Gerald.

Seriously.

If you're reading this with a child who can handle Piggie's lines, split the parts.

That's where this book gets interesting.

There is no narrator standing between us and the characters. Willems wrote the entire thing as dialogue. So you're not describing Gerald's skepticism.

You are Gerald's skepticism.

And Gerald needs a voice.

Piggie needs one too.

Now you've got theater.

That's a terrific setup for an early reader, because the words are simple without making the experience feel small. A child takes Piggie, an adult takes Gerald, and suddenly reading practice doesn't feel quite so much like practice.

It's a performance.

I'm not the only one who does it that way, either. One reader, Dolly, describes the exact same arrangement at home: "As always, our oldest reads Gerald's dialogue and I read Piggie's dialogue (plus any extras)."

The other thing I like is Piggie's relationship with failure.

She fails almost immediately.

Doesn't bother her much.

She just renames it.

Practice.

Then she tries something else.

That can turn corny very quickly in a children's book. Piggie saves it because she isn't walking around explaining her growth mindset.

She's too busy trying to fly.

Much better.

And then comes the bit I especially like. She needs help.

The story doesn't treat that as cheating.

Piggie wanted to fly.

She found somebody who could help.

Up she goes.

There are worse ideas for a kid to carry out of a book.

Gerald is equally important, because without him Piggie's confidence has nothing to bounce off. He's the straight man. Careful. Skeptical. Increasingly exasperated.

Piggie needs Gerald to say no.

Otherwise there's nothing funny about yes.

Readit's Review

I knew Piggie was going to fly somehow.

You cannot call the book Today I Will Fly! and then just have her walk around.

That would be terrible.

Gerald needs to calm down.

Every time Piggie tries something, he's right there explaining why it didn't count.

She jumped.

She got thrown.

Okay, Gerald.

We saw it.

My favorite part is that Piggie doesn't care very much.

She just keeps going.

Also, getting help from a duck absolutely counts.

If I say I'm going to get onto the roof, I don't have to build the ladder myself.

Actually, I'm probably not allowed on the roof.

Forget that example.

I would want to read Piggie's part because Gerald worries too much.

But I also want to make Gerald's face.

His eyes look like something terrible is happening even when Piggie is just talking.

And at the end HE wants to fly.

Aha!

Now who's being ridiculous?

What Others Think

Readers have had nearly twenty years to decide whether they like this pair. Apparently they do. Goodreads shows 4.34 out of 5 from 17,351 ratings, with about 646 written reviews.

The reactions that interested me most weren't about the plot. They were about what people do with this book.

Jennifer Toomey reports from a classroom: "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. Off a sixty-four-page early reader. That tells you what's actually in here.

Ninjamechanic gets at the other thing this book does: "One of the best things about kiddos is the day they say, 'I want to read this, to you.'"

That's the whole ballgame for an early reader, and it's why the design matters. Jennifer, a different reviewer, put her finger on the mechanism: "Lots of white space makes these approachable for those learning to read and the format for each page is similar without being boring."

Beckett keeps it brief: "Check out the facial expressions, exceptional."

And Melki has the cleanest summary of the whole friendship anybody has managed: "Pig is an optimist who is convinced she can fly. Her friend Elephant is much more down-to-earth. He is sure she will never get off the ground."

Now the criticism, and there are two worth hearing.

Tim has read every Elephant & Piggie book with his daughter, and thinks this first one is off: "In the first book, Gerald (the elephant) seems more impatient with Piggie than usual and there's a bit more sarcasm in this one. My daughter even commented last time we read it that Gerald 'is having a bad day.'" He gave it three stars and figures Willems "would go on to make much better books with these characters."

Cloud goes further and doesn't care for it at all: "The art style is basic and the text is very straightforward and repetitive... There is just something viscerally annoying about this book that grates on my nerves."

Both fair. This does feel like Willems finding the exact temperature of the friendship rather than arriving with it.

But the ingredients are already here.

Piggie charges forward.

Gerald worries.

Faces happen.

Kids laugh.

We're off.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

Willems doesn't need much.

Two characters.

Speech balloons.

White background.

One impossible plan.

The comedy comes from contrast. Piggie believes. Gerald doubts. Piggie tries something ridiculous. Gerald reacts as though he's personally responsible for enforcing the laws of physics.

Then those faces do the rest.

Give Gerald a worried voice and Piggie a completely confident one and you've got a strong read-aloud.

Better yet, hand one part to a kid.

Now you're not reading them a funny book.

You're doing the act together.

That's a 4.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd recommend Today I Will Fly! for ages 4 to 8, with an especially strong vote for beginning readers who are ready to move from being read to toward doing some of the reading themselves.

There are very few words in this book. One reviewer noted there aren't "enough words to be even a reading level 1 book."

But word count doesn't explain why a kid would want to read those words again.

Gerald and Piggie do.

The colored speech balloons make the character parts easy to follow. The facial expressions reward looking closely. The all-dialogue text invites voices. And Piggie's repeated attempts give the whole thing enough momentum that the reading doesn't feel like an exercise.

It feels like a show.

If your child likes that part of it, and starts wanting to make characters talk past the edge of the page, I wrote the next step. How To Make Your Sock Talk is a beginner's guide to ventriloquism for ages 5 to 10, and it teaches the real thing. Same pleasure, different equipment. Piggie gets a speech balloon. Your sock gets a voice.

As for Piggie?

She said she'd fly.

Gerald said she couldn't.

One of them ends this book in the air.

I'll let Gerald explain the rest.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit