Best Friends Think Alike

From School Library Journal PreSchool-Grade 2. Picture books about friends who resolve their differences abound, but Reiser's use of color to tell this one makes it an unusual offering. Presented as a play, the story concerns two girls who plan an afternoon in the park; they are introduced in their respective shades: Ruby in red and Beryl in blue. The girls hatch the idea to play horse and rider, but a problem develops when both of them want to be the horse. A solution emerges when they decide that each can be both a horse and a rider. The endpapers consist of a page of vertical red stripes and a page of horizontal blue ones, and these stripes reappear in the girls' clothing in the cartoon illustrations done in Sharpie and Crayola markers. Turn the page, and the stripes have crisscrossed to form a purple-hued checkered pattern symbolic of the mingling of the two friends' ideas. The text, printed in red when Ruby speaks and in blue for Beryl, is repetitious as the girls echo one another. When their ideas coincide, the print is purple. Smaller illustrations surrounded by white space frequently resemble the outline drawings in a coloring book. Reiser's Margaret and Margarita, Margarita y Margaret (Greenwillow, 1993), another story of friendship despite differences, would be a suitable complement.?Marianne Saccardi, Norwalk Community-Technical College, CTCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From