We Are in a Book! by Mo Willems

Hey, Story Seekers!

Every so often a children's book takes something completely ordinary, like turning a page, and makes kids look at it the way you'd look at a trapdoor that just opened in the floor.

We Are in a Book! does exactly that.

If you're new around here, I'm Jungle Jimmy the Book Explorer, children's author, dad, and longtime performer for kids. My expedition partner is Readit the Book Worm, who crawls right past my grown-up observations and finds the thing a kid actually wants to talk about.

He didn't have to crawl far on this one.

Book Breakdown

Gerald and Piggie are doing what Gerald and Piggie do when they notice something strange.

Somebody is looking at them.

Gerald is concerned. Piggie works it out.

It's us.

The reader.

They aren't just characters in a story anymore. They're characters inside the book we are holding, and then they discover the really good part: if words appear on the page, the person holding the book has to say them.

Piggie sees possibilities.

This is where Mo Willems takes an idea that sounds far too complicated for a beginning reader and makes it obvious. Gerald and Piggie don't explain how books work. They figure out the rules themselves, start playing with them, and pull the reader into the joke.

Then Gerald discovers another rule.

Books end.

Uh-oh.

That is a much bigger problem when you are the one living inside one.

Disney-Hyperion published it on September 14, 2010, as the thirteenth Elephant & Piggie book. Willems wrote and illustrated it, and that matters here, because the pictures aren't decoration wrapped around the dialogue. They are doing a lot of the talking.

Gerald and Piggie stand against nearly empty pages. Kirkus put it plainly: "Uncluttered pages feature the two main characters against clean white space." There is nowhere else for a child's eye to go. You watch their faces, their posture, where they're looking, and how fast Gerald's mood can collapse when new information reaches that elephant brain.

The speech balloons do real work too. Kirkus noted they're "rendered in softly colored word balloons (pink for Piggie, gray for Elephant)." A child who can't yet track who is speaking in a block of text can track it instantly by color.

Willems also lets the characters notice the balloons. They aren't only speaking through them. They know they're there.

That's a nifty trick in a book of 256 words.

And those 256 words are exactly why this is interesting for first graders. There's no wall of text waiting to scare anybody off. It's dialogue, expressions, reactions and white space. One child can read Gerald while somebody else reads Piggie. Switch parts. Do the voices. Ham it up.

I approve of the hamming.

It also took a 2011 Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor, which is the American Library Association's award for the most distinguished American book for beginning readers. That is the committee that judges books on exactly the thing this one is trying to do.

For teachers and librarians: TeachingBooks lists Lexile 200L, ATOS 0.9, Guided Reading Level H, 256 words, AR quiz 154356, 0.5 points. The publisher puts the book at ages 3 to 5 and 64 pages, though the Geisel committee and most classroom use push it later, into kindergarten through second grade.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Here's what I like most.

The reading is the game.

Thirty years performing for children will teach you the difference between asking kids to watch something funny and giving them a job inside the funny thing.

This book gives them the job.

Gerald and Piggie notice the reader. Then they react to the reader. Suddenly the kid holding the book isn't sitting outside the story. Willems has pulled that child onto the stage without moving anybody out of their chair.

That's good performance thinking.

It's also why I'd hand it to first graders. Give the two characters to two readers and let them perform the conversation. The faces tell you how a line should sound, so expression isn't a second assignment bolted on after the decoding is done. It's sitting right there.

Gerald doesn't need a sentence telling us he's worried.

Look at him.

Piggie doesn't need much help either.

And I like that Willems trusts beginning readers with a genuinely strange idea. The characters know they're fictional. They know a reader controls part of what happens. They know the pages are running out.

Kids get it.

Nobody stops the story to explain the clever part.

That's worth noticing, because plenty of books would have.

There's also a real emotional turn when Gerald realizes the fun has to end. It's funny, because Gerald is Gerald and panic is practically a hobby of his. But there's something recognizable underneath. Kids know exactly what it's like to want a good thing to keep going.

The answer is perfect for a book about reading.

You can always go around again.

Readit's Review

Wait.

They can SEE me?

That's the part I like.

Gerald and Piggie are looking out of the book at the person reading it, and then Piggie figures out she can make the reader say stuff.

That would be the first thing I tried too.

Actually, no. The first thing I would do is find out how ridiculous a word I could make somebody say.

Piggie picks a pretty good one.

Then Gerald starts worrying because they're getting close to the end. I wanted to tell him, "Gerald, you are in an Elephant and Piggie book. You worry about everything."

I also like watching their faces when they figure things out. Gerald can go from fine to completely freaked out in one page.

I would read Piggie's part.

Somebody else can be Gerald.

You have to do the voices, though.

That's a rule I just made up.

What Others Think

The reader response here is unusually lopsided in one direction.

On Goodreads the book sits at 4.53 out of 5 from 18,903 ratings. That is the highest-rated book in the whole Elephant & Piggie series and the most-rated, which is not an accident of shelving. That is people going out of their way.

The most useful review I found isn't a review at all. It's a dad transcribing his two daughters after they finished it.

Eleanor, asked for her favorite part: "My favorite part is when they said, 'Banana!'"

Gwennie went broader: "My favorite part was about, when they said, 'We are in a book!' And also when they said, 'He's a reader!'"

There you go.

Sometimes an adult writes several paragraphs about children's literature and a small child walks in and identifies the important parts in about nine words.

Another parent, reading to his daughter through the lockdown year, landed on why the series survives repeat readings: the stories are "easy to do ridiculous voices with," and he found himself enjoying the book more than she did. His description of the plot is my favorite thing anybody has written about it. Gerald has an existential crisis when he realizes the book is ending, pleads with the reader to keep going, and the ending loops back to the beginning.

He calls it postmodernism for four-year-olds.

He's not entirely joking.

The recurring pattern across the reviews is consistent: easy enough that beginning readers take ownership of it, funny enough that the practice doesn't feel like practice, and built to invite another trip through.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

This isn't joke-joke-joke comedy.

The funny part is the situation.

Gerald and Piggie discover us, discover what they can make us do, and react like they've found the greatest toy ever invented. Add Willems' expressions, Gerald's talent for panic, and an adult willing to perform, and there's plenty to play with.

The repeated reader reports of laughing, shouting the silly word and going straight back to the first page push this comfortably to a four.

I'm protecting the five.

But this one gets close.

Final Explorer Verdict

We Are in a Book! is an especially good pick for kindergarten through second grade, beginning readers, first-grade classrooms, reluctant readers who freeze at crowded pages, and families who like taking character parts.

For first graders I'd put it near the top of the pile.

The vocabulary is manageable. The pages breathe. The pictures carry the emotion. Two kids can perform it together. And it hands them the feeling that they aren't merely decoding words correctly.

They're in on the joke.

That's a pretty good reason to turn another page.

If your kid takes to this one, the whole series is worth knowing, and I ranked all twenty-five Elephant & Piggie books in order, including which seven took Geisel medals or honors. Book one, Today I Will Fly!, is a gentler place to start if this one felt like a stretch.

And if what your kid loved was being smarter than the book, that's the exact game I play in Look! There Are No Dinos Inside Of This Book. Dangerous Dave insists he has removed every last dinosaur. The pictures disagree. Your kid gets to catch him.

Gerald and Piggie know the reader is there.

Dave has no idea.

Both work.

Until our next expedition, keep exploring those books.

Jungle Jimmy & Readit