From Slate: Authors and illustrators reflect on what Arnold Lobel’s friendship-defining series means to them… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!
“The very first thing is sad,” marvels Mac Barnett about the opening story in Frog and Toad Are Friends. Barnett, a prolific children’s book author whose work includes Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, is right about that. 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. It is the first day of spring, and Frog is eager for a celebratory post-hibernation reunion. But Toad won’t get out of bed. He tells Frog to return in a month and hops back to sleep. 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. “Faced with the prospect of being alone for a month or committing an act of deception, he deceives his best friend,” Barnett explains. “And it’s a happy ending because they’re together. These amphibians, they act in complicated ways to each other, but the friendship is the only thing standing between them and despair.”
For the uninitiated, reading such deep psychodrama into a story about a couple of anthropomorphic polliwogs might seem a bit much. But anyone who’s spent time in the world Lobel built for these two critters knows that, if anything, it’s almost an understatement. Frog and Toad, like their forebears in The Wind in the Willows, may bumble about the forest in tweed sports coats, but the accumulated weight of the tales is unexpectedly moving. Though each short story begins with the premise of an adventure, the plot twist is that, invariably, nothing really happens. We don’t go far with Frog and Toad, yet in story after story, we do gain a crystalline sense of their relationship. Frog and Toad are friends, in every sustaining and stress-inducing sense of the word.
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