By Dana Simpson
Calvin and Hobbes, if Calvin were a lonely, sarcastic girl and Hobbes were a unicorn who can't stop admiring her own reflection.
Phoebe skips a rock across a pond and beans a unicorn right in the face. The unicorn's name is Marigold Heavenly Nostrils, and she'd been standing there transfixed by her own reflection, so getting knocked out of it means she owes Phoebe a wish. Phoebe wishes for Marigold to be her best friend, and now Marigold has to be. That's the whole setup. Everything after it is short comic strips: three or four panels, a punchline at the bottom, page after page for 224 of them. Marigold is enormously vain and completely deadpan. Phoebe is sarcastic and nerdy and short on friends. To keep anyone at school from noticing a unicorn trailing her around, Marigold uses her Shield of Boringness.
If you've got a fluent reader whose unicorn phase has outlasted the picture books, this is the one that carries them forward. The humor is dry and comes at you sideways — Marigold's vanity is played dead straight, never winked at, so a child has to meet the joke halfway, and landing it is the fun. Because it's built from short strips, one at breakfast or forty at bedtime both feel fine, which makes it a real find for a reader who won't commit to a novel yet. It's also the one on this shelf I ended up reading over their shoulder. And there are around twenty volumes, so an obsession this size has plenty of room to grow.