THE FRIENDSHIP SURPRISE

A fox frets that an old friend and a new one will shut him out if he introduces them in this follow-up to Before We Sleep (2021).

Having made friends with Brock the badger over the winter, Little Red can hardly wait for his longtime bestie Hazel the dormouse to come out of hibernation so that all three of them can play together. By the time Hazel emerges from her teapot home, Little Red has had second thoughts. But when his strenuous efforts to keep the two apart come to naught, Hazel laughingly reassures him that she’s not going to throw him over. Neither will Brock, as it turns out, and so all three gambol off—or, as Volpe puts it: “One, two, three, and they all started playing together, just as friends do.” Sprays of lovely flowers and greenery give Proietti’s misty, rolling woodland settings a sunlit, beguiling serenity…but along with, oddly, outfitting Hazel with trousers while leaving the other two animals au naturel, the artist cuts abruptly from spring to autumn with a page turn and finishes with an isolated view of Little Red looking disturbingly like he’s about to pounce on, say, a juicy dormouse. Next to the previous outing’s sensitive exploration of both the close relationship between Hazel and Little Red and the emotional stress of being separated (by impending winter), this all comes off as a mix of confusing visual missteps tied to a perfunctory bit of relationship chess. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A weak sequel run off literally by the numbers, with pretty but sometimes unsettling pictures.