In his beloved Hat Trilogy, Jon Klassen won young readers over by making them feel like insiders: they always knew more than his flawed animal characters did. The bear in
I Want My Hat Back, for instance, eventually realizes he has seen his hat, while the astute reader saw it pages ago. The fun and the tension come from waiting for each protagonist’s awareness to catch up with our own.
Though Klassen’s latest borrows characters, visual elements, and themes from the trilogy, it’s less a continuous, building narrative than a series of interrelated set pieces. In this, it arguably offers even more fodder for lively discussion than its predecessors.