I'M SORRY!

Two friends try to apologize.

Scribble and Swoop are best friends, spending their days supporting each other’s creative endeavors in the ever sunny Walnut Woods. Scribble is a fuzzy orange squirrel, and Swoop is a blue-and-white owl with eyelashes and a heart-shaped face, and one day they decide to move in together. In an idyllic three-page moving montage, they find the perfect place, with “room for two with a little left over,” and unpack their things, individually deciding that the porch would be the ideal place to pursue their respective craft—and hiding it from their housemate. Things go predictably south, as Scribble wakes up early to open “the world’s greatest theater” while Swoop shuffles her tools into her dream studio space. A “CLATTER-BANG-CRASH” of a fight ensues, creating plenty of lingering resentment. A very drawn-out and ultimately anticlimactic apology sequence follows, in which readers are taught (probably not for the first time) that sorry “only works if you mean it.” Ironically, Scribble, though repentant, never does give a genuine apology, leaving Swoop to fix his curtains, his special pencil, and his ego, and then go on to create the sets for his plays. Julian’s sweet watercolor illustrations bring the ultimately uninspired text to life, with a cheerful palette and some creative use of the gutter.

This woodland duo’s lesson in communication is ultimately unpersuasive.