By Maureen Tai, 4 April 2021
My Friend is Sad (ages 2 +) is another funny, engaging and endearing instalment in Mo Willems’ Elephant & Piggie series of easy-readers. Stodgy, bespectacled Elephant is sad. His best friend, quirky, quick-thinking Piggie, decides to dress up as a cowboy, then a clown and finally a robot to cheer him up. Piggie’s plans fail, but not for reasons you’d expect! Deceptively simple, comic-like pictures perfectly convey the two friends’ distinct, yet complementary, personalities and wild swings of emotions while the large-sized speech-bubbled text will encourage younger readers to try their hand at reading independently. This hilarious story will tickle readers of all ages.
NOTE: Thank you for reading my reviews! I’ll never take this website down, but in the interests of streamlining, from 1 January 2025, I’ll be posting new reviews on my writer website, www.maureentai.com, where I post lots of other bookish extras. See you there!
I love growing-up stories (fictional or otherwise) as they allow me to relive my own rather idyllic childhood spent in a small town in Malaysia. Hattie is a charming, not-quite-middle grade chapter book, translated from Swedish, that follows the irrepressibly mischievous yet irresistibly loveable six-year old from her first day of her first year of school to the summer holidays. Each chapter is a short, self-contained story of an event in Hattie’s life and while each event is actually pretty “normal”, they are very, very funny to read about. Ben points out when we read together that he is reminded of 
Anna was barely six months old when we were gifted a hard copy of The Frog and Toad Treasury by a dear friend. I confess to not having grown up with these delightful early-reader stories, written in the 70s by the award winning children’s illustrator and author, Arnold Lobel. But I had the incomparable pleasure of reading them aloud to Anna many years ago, listening to her reading them to herself and then, to her younger brother, and today in a sunny spot in the living room, reading them again and having a good chuckle. The tales are as timeless as the friendship between the two anthropomorphic amphibians, and as enjoyable as my first reading over a decade ago. 
Stories That Stay With Us 