“We Found a Hat’’

By Jon Klassen, Candlewick, $17.99, ages 4-8

When I heard that Jon Klassen was following up his bestsellers, “I Want My Hat Back’’ and “This Is Not My Hat,’’ with a third in the series I wondered, naturally, about the new hat. The first book features a pointy red party hat. In the second there is a blue bowler. Both books feature small animals who, after they filch hats from larger animals, lose big to their food-chain overlords. Would the next book tell the story of a mole who dons a beret or a hedgehog sporting a fedora? Klassen is trickier than I imagined, though, flipping the script in his latest story. The silly and heartbreaking “We Found a Hat’’ stars a 10-gallon hat and a pair of overly considerate, endearingly shifty-eyed turtles who find it.

The cowboy hat perfectly fits the setting, a desert of muted pinks and beiges. But there’s little to see in the landscape — just a cactus and a couple of rocks — so the hat seems like a novelty worth coveting. The initial plot points sound like a set-up ripe for a lesson about cooperation, but Klassen is full of surprises.

The first is that the characters share a peculiar quality with the animals in Klassen’s first two hat books. The turtles, like the bear, the bunny, and the fish in the previous stories, are anthropomorphized — they like hats and have human emotions — but they remain slightly dopey. Kid readers are sharper and know the drill. One object of desire and two animals? That’s easy. The turtles should just share.

But the turtles can’t do the math. Both want the hat, but each is afraid of hurting the other’s feelings. They model it for each other and trade compliments: “How does it look on me? It looks good on you. How does it look on me? It looks good on you too.’’ Then they leave the hat behind reluctantly to watch the setting sun together.

This story does not end with an emblematic Western sunset, however.

Klassen’s hallmark deadpan style continues in Part Three “Going to Sleep’’ in which the turtles try mightily to shake their longing for the hat. Throughout the simple, repetitive text hits a sweet spot for beginning readers, yet honors their intelligence with sophisticated, dry wit, too.

Can the turtles give up the hat? Will they ever learn to share? In the end, Klassen trades the cheerful and bloodless brutality of the first two hat books for a transcendent ending. “We Found a Hat’’ is a moving story about loyalty, sacrifice, friendship, and the power of imagination.

NICOLE LAMY