The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend

Beekle is born on a distant island where imaginary friends wait, sometimes for a very long time, to be imagined and named by an actual child somewhere in the real world. When his turn never seems to come, Beekle does something none of the other imaginary friends on the island dare to try: he sets out alone across the ocean to find a child himself. The real world Beekle discovers is loud, unfamiliar, and often frightening for a small, quiet, crowned creature with no one who knows him, and Dan Santat spends real time on that mismatch before Beekle, exhausted and near tears at the top of a tree, is finally spotted by a girl named Alice, who turns out to have been imagining a friend just like him all along. The two recognize each other immediately, and the story closes with an entire ordinary, happy friendship opening up in front of them.

Santat renders the imaginary friends' island in bright, almost candy colored washes and shifts the real world into cooler grays once Beekle arrives there alone, a color change that tracks his loneliness without needing a word of text to explain it. Working mostly digitally with some traditional touches layered in, Santat gives Beekle curved, soft features against a more angular human world, and the whole book is narrated from Beekle's own point of view, which lets very young readers sit inside a new arrival's fear of not belonging before the story resolves it. The book runs forty pages and reads at a gentle pace suited to preschool and early elementary listeners, and because Beekle's fear of the unfamiliar real world is drawn so plainly, the story doubles easily as a way to talk with a child about their own first days somewhere new, a classroom, a neighborhood, without ever using that language directly.