His duo consisted of an anxious male elephant named Gerald and a sunny female pig named Piggie-“technically, a friendship between an African and a European,” he said. Go!,” Willems wanted to write what was missing. That’s just not what interested those guys.” Instead of imitating what he loved about “Go, Dog. Seuss imprint, at Random House.) Willems admires those writers’ books, but notes that “they’re not about interiority or emotions. (Eastman served under Theodor Geisel in the Army later, his books were published by the Dr. Willems considers Eastman to be “part of the ‘Mad Men’ era of children’s books,” along with Dr. “I wanted those dogs to have it out-to have a conflict and then find a way to resolve it, to bring the friendship back into balance.” That classic has a running gag in which a girl dog says to a boy dog, “Do you like my hat?,” and the boy dog, in different settings and in response to different hats, repeatedly says, “No.” “Even as a seven-year-old kid, I knew that she should be saying, ‘Well, screw you! Do you know how hard I worked on this hat? How much money this hat cost? Why should I even be trying to please you?’ ” In the Eastman book, the dogs part amicably, with a simple “Good-by!” “I wanted to do the dog scene again and again,” Willems said. Go!,’ which was something I loved as a kid,” he told me recently. Ages 3-6.A little more than a decade ago, the children’s-book author and illustrator Mo Willems had an idea for a new series. This title lacks the hilarity of Willems's previous accounts of persuasion, but it does assert the power of a spoonful of sugar. The simply drawn children recall the various Peanuts characters, and the insistent mice clown around in ways that reward rereading. Finally the girl appeals to her father with a gracefully hand-lettered 'please' that does the trick, and the tutorial concludes with the rodents begging (politely) for a bite of her hard-earned cookie. Have an ulterior motive-wave banners and fly tiny zeppelins emblazoned with word-by-word commands: 'Go ask a big person/ and/ Please say 'please'!' Then, in a digression from the main story, they and some other children demonstrate the versatile applications of 'please,' 'excuse me,' 'sorry' and 'thank you' ('you have to mean it!').

As she resists their advice, the mute mice-who might The gaggle of Ignatz-lookalike mice first introduced in Time to Pee!ĭispense the lesson, instructing a girl who wants a cookie by holding up four red placards shaped like stop signs ('Don't just grab it!') to arrest her first impulse. In this etiquette lesson (from which Pigeon, star of a few other of Willems's picture books, could benefit), the author explains the tactical usefulness of the magic word. Willems's assertive characters know what they want, but they seldom ask for it politely.

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