As attuned as contemporary children’s literature is to the psychological and developmental needs of children, it’s still surprising, as a parent reading Frog and Toad, to hear your kids spoken to the way Lobel speaks to them, and to hear the way he speaks to you too. These amphibians, they act in complicated ways to each other, but the friendship is the only thing standing between them and despair.”Īcknowledging the fact that adults and kids feel with the same passion and intensity, even if they read on different levels, is central to both the composition and reception of Lobel’s books. “And it’s a happy ending because they’re together. “Faced with the prospect of being alone for a month or committing an act of deception, he deceives his best friend,” Barnett explains. Frog pleads, “But Toad, I will be lonely until then.” Instead of resigning himself to isolation, Frog sneaks back into Toad’s house, rips a handful of pages out of the calendar, wakes Toad back up, and tricks him into believing a month has passed. He tells Frog to return in a month and hops back to sleep.
It is the first day of spring, and Frog is eager for a celebratory post-hibernation reunion. Though the book series by Arnold Lobel has filled young readers with a sense of warmth and closeness for five decades, Frog and Toad opens with disappointment and desperation. Barnett, a prolific children’s book author whose work includes Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, is right about that. “The very first thing is sad,” marvels Mac Barnett about the opening story in Frog and Toad Are Friends.
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