Today’s featured book is a little off topic, but for a very special reason. There’s no theological depth to it, no stirring images of God, no Gospel, but it’s a book that has won the heart of our whole family and has endeared itself to one particular little girl who, as I write, is sleeping in popsicle PJs, her arm slung around her dad’s funky old teddy bear.
Her name is Sarah. And today, she turns three.
So I thought we’d celebrate by toasting one of her all-time favorite books, We Are in a Book! We have loved all of the Elephant & Piggie books so much that finding a new one at the library creates an anticipatory buzz throughout our whole house. “Papa, we got a new Elephant & Piggie! Come see!”
But there’s only one book in the series that we’ve felt compelled to own, partly because it is wonderful and partly because Sarah memorized the whole thing and took to flipping through it, “reading” the story in her own toddler way (while Mitch and I spied on her from the kitchen, quaking with suppressed laughter).
The premise of the book is uniquely hilarious, but I can’t tell you about it without dampening its charm, so I’ll tell you instead that it reduced my husband and I (and the many guests who had the book dropped in their lap with a pleading, “You read this to me?”) to unbecoming laughter—tears, snorts and all.
At three, Sarah already has excellent taste in books: I frankly can’t imagine anyone that this book wouldn’t appeal to, so I give We Are in a Book! the heartiest of recommendations. (It’s always a mercy when the girls attach to a book that we actually enjoy rereading every few minutes.)
We are in a Book!
Mo Willems (2010)
