Ways to Make Friends

There are countless children’s books about friendship, including those about making friends, sharing friends, how to be a good friend, and losing friends. The best and most natural works tend to be about friends in pairs; whether the book is about an established couple of friends having adventures or about two strangers getting to know each other, the one-on-one setup makes it easier to direct both the narrative and the reader’s attention. We almost instinctively zoom in on what “Those Two” are doing. We are already interested, even if they are “only” a bit of yellow paper and a bit of blue paper (no offense meant to the tender Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni).

It is not so easy to write about a lone protagonist who wants to make friends without having an idea of whom, specifically, they want to have as their friend. Wanting friends is a vague goal and seems to highlight a deficiency in the protagonist–why don’t they already have friends; what’s wrong with them? They must be so lonely! We view the lone (assumed lonely) with pity or suspicion, or both. This state can also be depicted with great sensitivity and affection, as in Emily Gravett’s Blue Chameleon, but the fact remains that writing about making unspecified friends without focusing on loneliness and feelings of rejection is difficult. Works that try too hard to give blithe assurances will feel contrived and goody-goody. Grownups and children both know that making friends is a mysterious, difficult process that we don’t completely understand even as it happens to us. The common formula, therefore, is for the protagonist to be rejected by several friend candidates before finally being accepted by one or more friends.

Here now, in Buitrago and Johnson’s Ways to Make Friends is a subtle story about making friends that does not feel forced while also avoiding either the message that being alone means you are a sad person, or that you should be ecstatic to be all by yourself all the time. There are no lessons to be learned, but some gentle encouragement and affirmation. This is astonishing, because Ways to Make Friends actually follows the classic formula of rejection-rejection-rejection-friendship at the end, with the friendship only being shown in the illustration on the final page, with no accompanying text (plus one other place which will be discussed below). Yet there are no hurt feelings in the rejections that we can see, only quiet optimism and goodwill.

In a world of anthropomorphized animals, our protagonist is a frog (or toad) of indeterminate gender, wearing a red shirt and dark overalls with red sneakers. In order to make friends, they first sit under a large tree and wait for someone to approach them. Overhead, other children are playing in the tree, but they do not call down to the frog, and the frog does not look up. Then they try helping others or giving gifts: they release a caged bird hoping the bird will remember them with gratitude, scoop up a bee from water, hand out paper dolls and fruit, demonstrate how to make shadow puppets. The next strategy is to approach with more aggression by speaking with their unknown neighbor at the movies and greeting “the shy kid who never says hello to anyone” relentlessly. Finally our frog takes a surprised-looking cactus on a walk! It’s unclear if the cactus was informed beforehand. As you can see, the frog’s behavior seems set to escalate. Then, though, the book pauses and changes direction:

But if by late afternoon you get tired of making friends, just be by yourself and forget everything that this book has told you to do.

The frog spends a busy, happy afternoon alone and goes to bed with a smile. On the last page, the bird released in the beginning returns to say hello as the cactus looks on.

What I find so disarming about this is that, although Ways to Make Friends seems to follow the formulaic progression, it actually challenges it. The children who are approached by the frog and whose role it is to reject them do not explicitly do so. They are simply depicted as playing by themselves, ambiguously friendly or indifferent to our frog. When fruit and dolls are shared, the interactions are open to interpretation as the animals’ body language is open, but there is no other interaction. And when our frog is sitting alone after these implied or assumed friendship failures, in the classic ‘sulk’ or ‘sad’ position of facing away from the reader with knees pulled up, the side of their face shows that they are smiling. Finally, there is a secret in the endpapers: the front endpapers show all the animal children playing by themselves individually, but we do not see the frog. The endpapers at the back of the book show animals in clusters of twos and threes, and our frog is playing ball with a bat and the freed bird. Friendship has been achieved: through kindness and perseverance? By luck? Who knows how or when. It is in the end still a mystery, but not one to be stressed out about. Perhaps the point Ways to Make Friends wants to make is that you should just let it happen as it happens. And if it doesn’t work out, you can “learn to be your own best friend.”

The text is intimate and gentle. It reads like a work written by a bilingual author, but I do not mean that it feels like a British book or an American book; I mean that I feel as though I am reading this book in its original text, even though I know it was first published in Spanish. As a translated work, it likely owes much to Elisa Amado’s thoughtful reflection of the author’s intent. The illustrations are large and spacious with a soft color palette and adorably anthropomorphized animals. It is as though Richard Scarry met Mo Willems and learned to do digital art, updating his general look. It has an early reader vibe to it and should be good for shared reading with a grownup, storytimes for those with longer attention spans, or solitary reading.