Corduroy

The story is this: There's a toy bear named Corduroy. A little girl is shopping with her mother, sees him, and asks her mother to buy him. Her mother says, "Not today," and Corduroy realizes via the exchange that he is missing a button from his overalls. That night, he goes searching the department store for it, and ends up on the second floor. He knocks over a lamp, alerting a security guard, who brings him back down to the toy aisle where he was before. The next morning, the little girl comes back and buys him (she counted up the money in her piggy bank). She takes him home and fixes his button. The end.

I love the fact that the first thing the girl says, upon seeing the bear, is, "Oh, Mommy!" "Look! There's the very bear I've always wanted." My four-year-old does this kind of thing all the time, but it's not literally true. Usually he just says something like, "I always wanted this!" Even though he's never seen whatever it is before, nor previously expressed any desire to have one. If my four-year-old were in the store, he would literally forget about the bear after seeing another cool toy. The girl in the story is a bit older, though, and follows through with her statement. Interestingly, the bear talks in exactly the same way ("I guess I've always wanted to live in a palace"), so maybe the bear's adventure is implied to be imagined by the girl in the interim between when she first sees him and when she buys him. For example, on the last pages, he says, "You must be a friend... I've always wanted a friend." "'Me too!' said Lisa, and gave him a big hug." So she can hear what he "says", and he has similar speech patterns to her.

There's not much to it. There's no conflict. There's no character development. It's pretty basic. It's just like a fantasy of what a toy bear might do if he realized that he'd lost a button.