Ways to Make Friends

PreS-Gr 2–A young frog offers earnest advice to anyone looking to make a friend. There’s good advice (“Say hi to the shy kid who never says hi to anyone”); silly advice (“You can dress up like an apple or a pear and give away a pear or an apple”); and advice that is questionable at best (“When you are at your aunt’s house, you can free a bird”). And if none of it works, the narrator suggests becoming your own best friend by learning a few ways to entertain yourself. By the end of the book, the narrator has indeed made a couple of friends, and the end papers show all the young creatures interacting happily. Comical illustrations just this side of surreal done with colored pens and digital colors show a skewed world with a diverse cast of animal (and insect and plant) characters learning to navigate new relationships. This is certain to spark lively debate at story hours.