Celebrating a Best Friend in a Captivating New Picture Book

An exquisite new picture book about making a best friend is sure to find a treasured place on many bookshelves.

My best friend, by Julie Fogliano and Jillian Tamaki (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster), beautifully captures the magical spirit of childhood friendships at an age when children are still figuring out what it means to have—and to be—a friend. Fogliano, a New York Times bestselling author and Ezra Jack Keats Award winner, uses spare, almost poetic prose to express a young child’s feelings in words that feel perfectly pitched to picture-book age. “i have a new friend,” the narrator begins, “and her hair is black/and it shines/and it shines/and she always laughs at everything.”

We then see the narrator (who presents as a White girl) and her friend (who presents as an Asian girl) playing together throughout the day. They make duck bills with their hands “and run away quacking”; they sit under a tree when they are “feeling quiet”; they hide together and try not to laugh while playing hide-and-seek with some other children. The friend helps revive some flowers that the narrator accidentally steps on; the narrator makes her friend laugh by pretending to be a pickle. And even though the friend likes strawberry ice cream, which the narrator hates, “we are still friends even then/so that is something good.”

Tamaki, a Caldecott and Printz Award honoree, contributes as much to the story as Fogliano and is wisely given co-equal credit on the cover. She uses a spare palette of salmon pink, reddish brown, and green to convey the budding friendship’s earnest simplicity and its imaginative dynamism. Aside from the children, most of what we see in the illustrations are plants and animals—lush and full of life.

Some books about friendship may tug at emotions but be narratively dull. Not so here. From the quacking duck hands to the pickle imitation, to the long, cross-page “Boooooooo” the friend lets out while waving the “creepy” skeleton of a leaf, there’s plenty of gentle fun here that will engage young readers.

There’s nothing specifically LGBTQ-inclusive about this book, which makes it an oddity for a review here at Mombian. (Tamaki has, however, created several LGBTQ-inclusive books for older readers, including SuperMutant Magic Academy, and, with her cousin Mariko Tamaki, Skim and This One Summer.) Yet even though I don’t believe the creators intended the friendship between the girls to be a romantic one, nor any kind of hidden analogy for a queer relationship, there’s much here that warms my lesbian soul. At one point, for example, the girls are drawing with chalk on the ground, and the narrator says, “she drew me/and i drew her/and then we made hearts/around it.” I sort of want to put that on an anniversary card for my spouse.

I think it’s telling that Publishers Weekly says the book “captures the feeling of giddy infatuation when a child first meets another and feels an instant bond—it’s an early form of falling in love.” Those of us who view the world through rainbow-colored lenses may particularly appreciate seeing that bond between these two girls. Their friendship may remain platonic; it may evolve when they are older to be something more; or their deep connection may open one or both of their minds to the idea of romantic love between women, even if not with each other. All paths are possible, and that’s the beauty of it. For the moment, though, they are simply best friends, and that is enough.

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