Bink & Gollie: Best Friends Forever by Kate DiCamillo (review)

Welcome back, Bink and Gollie (from Bink and Gollie, BCCB 10/10, and Bink and Gollie: Two for One, BCCB 7/12)! In this new set of adventures, the friends negotiate Gollie's belief that she is of royal blood, Bink's employment of a contraption to make herself taller, and their shared determination to get their picture featured in a Guinness-like tome called Flicker's Arcana of the Extraordinary. The plots don't have quite the snap of the previous outings, but the text (almost all dialogue) retains its comic joy as it veers between Gollie's formal drawl ("I have long suspected that royal blood flowed in my veins") and Bink's ebullience ("Good news almost always means pancakes!"). As usual, Fucile packs his lines with springy energy, with even languid Gollie watchably angular and loose-limbed, while fizzbomb-y Bink, with her explosive hair, practically leaps off the pages. The page design has the lively paneled momentum and theatrical views of a graphic novel, and it effectively partners with the few swift sentences per spread to move novice readers easily through the book. Readers should meet Bink and Gollie first in their earlier titles, but those already fast friends with the girls won't want to miss their new adventures.