By Mo Willems
Every Elephant & Piggie book — all twenty-five — in one box: Gerald the worried gray elephant and Piggie the giddy pink pig bicker, fret, and crack each other up entirely in speech bubbles your child can read alone.
Gerald the elephant worries about everything; Piggie comes bouncing in and pulls him into the fun anyway. That's the engine, and across twenty-five books it runs through just about every small drama of being friends: one of them wants ice cream, one is scared of a thunderstorm, one won't share the new toy, one just found out they're stuck in a book and can make you say a silly word out loud. There's almost no narration. The whole story lives in two speech bubbles going back and forth — Piggie in pink, Gerald in gray — on wide-open white pages.
The words are few and they come back around, the two colors tell your child who's talking without anyone explaining it, and the joke at the end is always one they can catch on their own. A child opens one of these not sure they can really read, and closes it having read a whole book, cover to cover. Then there are twenty-four more in the box, so that 'I did it' feeling is there again the next night, and the night after. That's what makes the full set worth having over any single title — a child doesn't just read one, they learn to read on the whole run.