Making Friends: Together Forever by Kristen Gudsnuk

I'm pretty sure this is the real end. But any series that has run four books already could always have more, so I'll make that an assumption rather than a declaration. Kristen Gudsnuk will probably move on to do other wonderful, goofy, jokey graphic novels - for adults or middle-graders or who knows what audience next - but the "Making Friends" series is solidly wrapped up here.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about: Making Friends: Together Forever, as I implied, is fourth in a fantasy GN series from Scholastic, aimed at middle-graders. First was Making Friends, followed by Back to the Drawing Board and Third Time's a Charm. Gudsnuk is also the author of the excellent supervillain adventure Henchgirl, which I still recommend as the best place for an adult reader to start with her work.

Making Friends is about Dany: when the series started, she was just going into seventh grade and feeling lonely, in a new middle school where her old friends had completely disjoint schedules. And, when she got a heirloom sketchbook from her recently deceased Great-Aunt Elma, she started drawing in it - and discovered that anything she draws there pops into the real world.

So she drew a best friend: Madison Fontaine, just moved from NYC, cool and good at all of the things Dany thinks she's bad at. And things got complicated from there. Three books worth of complicated, which is more complicated than I can get into here. Let me also note that Gudsnuk, as a creator, does not shy away from complication but instead revels in it and builds it up to fantastic, wacky, amazing heights.

You may have an image in your head of how a GN about "girl is sad in middle school, then creates a best friend" might go. I would bet large sums of money that image is not nearly Gudsnukian enough. She has a humorously skewed point of view, the love of complication I just mentioned, and a bone-deep sense of just how silly she can push any situation - every last bit of this series is right up to the red line of cool/silly, without ever going over.

OK, maybe examples would help. There are two different artifacts of Dany's world in the early pages of this book I low-key want for myself. On the second page, there's a poster of a unicorn in sunglasses, in front of a rainbow, burning a dollar and saying "Stop buying stuff, you corporate stooge". And Dany slightly later wears a shirt that says "Race for The Cure" with a caricature of '80s-era Robert Smith. (Honestly, I would wear that right now if it existed.)

Together Forever, like the previous books, is full of little asides like that - one other example, which is actually thematically important, is the Toy Story-equivalent movie series, which is about sippy cups and is just as goofy (but actually funnier) than you expect.

Anyway: reality has been saved and rewritten and damaged multiple times already, by the notebook itself and by other forces looking to repair the world, or conquer it, or something in between, in the previous three books. At the end of the third book, Powerful Forces imposed a new order on reality, which seemed to be overall a good thing, to keep world-altering plots and crazy fabric-of-reality-destroying magic controlled, but it did leave Dany with only a tiny scrap of the notebook and stuck in a new world where no one else remembered what had happened. (Oh, and she has an alien impostor for a mom, to keep an eye on her.)

Worse, Madison was whisked away by those Powerful Forces, so Dany was back - somewhere in the winter or spring of a seventh grade that just would not end - somewhat lonely and wanting to change. But then Dany sees a new TV show, My Magical Best Friend, that stars Madison and seems to be based on her actual (pre-reality changes) life.

Dany wants her best friend back, and she's annoyed at the way this TV show presents her life. So she's going to use that tiny scrap of notebook in one last crazy plan to save Madison, get away from alien impostor mom, and become the Dany she knows she can be. (Possibly one full of "Le Existentialism" from reading Jean Paul Blart.)

It all goes goofy and complicated from there: this is a Kristen Gudsnuk book. And, as the jingle for the annoying TV show goes, "with magic and friendship anything is possible!"

There's a real ending, which closes out the series well. There's a lot of great dialogue - some heartfelt, some deeply goofy. And, like the previous three books, it's aimed at tween girls without being limited to them - if you ever were a goofball who wasn't sure how to fit into life, and wished you had magic to fix things, the Making Friends books are for you.