Even Better Than Sprinkles: A Story About Best Friends

Unicorns, cake sprinkles, and song mark this playtime-driven portrait of best-friend-dom, told in a wry second-person voice. Light comedy accompanies Skeers’s descriptions of imbalanced dynamics between the story’s BFFs. One friend, portrayed with brown skin, is oblivious to their own self-centered actions, while the other, shown with pink skin, tends to roll with the punches (“A friend will dress up in your homemade unicorn costume.... Even when your friend is the back half”). When the oblivious bestie “accidentally-on-purpose” blows out the candles on their bud’s birthday cake, there’s an understandable rupture between them. A subsequent apology seems driven, not by empathy or regret, but by the offending party’s desire for a playmate, a conclusion that is used to signify the “magical” connection between best friends in a work that strains to be jubilant. Ages 4–8. (June)