“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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