A book a day: Olivier Tallec: A better best friend

In this fourth installment of the series of stories by Olivier Tallec starring a restless squirrel, the author follows the same thread as the previous stories and maintains the same tone that ranges between humorous and reflective.

In “A Best Best Friend,” our daring but hesitant squirrel questions what friendship is, what we can expect from it, and what it offers us. With this background theme, the story begins with the squirrel walking through the forest when, upon finding a mushroom, he makes the decision that it will be his best friend while he confesses that he has been looking for a best friend for a long time, something difficult because “unlike of pine cones falling from trees, best friends don’t.” So now it seems that you have found one you decide to find out if that mushroom could be your best friend. This excuse serves the author to analyze what friendship is about, what makes a friend become something special in our lives, what they offer us and give us but also what is expected of oneself.

Olivier Tallec knows how to play with humor to delve into these deeper themes where he talks to us about loneliness, the need for friendships, those shared moments that make them unique but also about the insecurity in our decisions. In fact, this is a common theme in his books, since our squirrel is often hesitant when it comes to making decisions, and this point is remarkable because it moves away from the usual models that we find in children’s stories where the protagonists tend to be daring and brave characters. With these weaknesses, Tallec brings his characters closer to readers and shares with them the doubts that we may have, especially at an early age when many of the decisions to be made are about issues that we are just experiencing for the first time.

For all this, and as I already highlighted in the overall review of this series of stories by Olivier Tallec, these are books that approach topics related to our personality and do so from a partially comic point of view that do not hide a background that goes beyond the warmth and grace of his drawings. Of course, you have to be prepared for open endings because, as in life, everything has to be decided and each person must choose how the story continues.