Harold & Hog Pretend for Real! by Dan Santat (review)

Harold and Hog are great fans of Mo Willems' characters Elephant and Piggie, so much so that Harold comes up with the idea that they should pretend to be them. Harold the elephant dons round glasses, and Hog puts on a humorously redundant paper pig nose. Then the trouble begins. Harold insists that Hog adopt Piggie's carefree, antic personality, smiling, dancing, and leaping with comic grace to show Hog how it's done, and then he demonstrates how he will perform the same feats in imitation of Gerald's careful demeanor. When Hog tries to behave like Piggie, Hog's own careful temperament will not allow smiling, dancing, and flying all at the same time. The two despair over their inability to act like their heroes until they switch roles, determining that there is more to similarity than appearance. This intertextual homage to the Elephant & Piggie series is blessed by Gerald and Piggie themselves with an encouraging letter from Mo Willems on endpapers showing the original pair reading the book and appearing as characters at the beginning and end. A big-headed blue pigeon also appears, but it's clearly not THE pigeon, as he declines an offer to pretend to drive the bus. Santat uses shading, shadows, and texture to give his characters a density that Willems' simpler shaped and flatly colored characters lack, but readers will recognize the early reader features, such as the use of repetition, antonyms, and speech bubbles colored to match the character speaking (salmon for Hog, and grey-green for Harold). The humor will be best appreciated by readers already familiar with Elephant & Piggie, but the message reaches anyone who has ever identified with a character based on temperament and behavioral style rather than physical similarities alone.