In our current moment, when children’s literature written and illustrated by queer artists about growing up LGBTQ is comparatively plentiful, Frog and Toad feels both anachronistic and modern.

Adrianne Lobel has elsewhere suggested that the books were a way for her father to work through his own coming out. Lobel wrote the Frog and Toad books over the course of the 1970s, a period during which he also came out to his wife-the Caldecott-winning illustrator and memoirist Anita Lobel-and children. For Andrea Loney, author of Bunnybear and Take a Picture of Me, James Van Der Zee!, the friendship between Frog and Toad is a model of “consistency, comfort, and forgiveness in a world that sometimes feels unsafe or confusing.” The stories “feel like a balm,” agrees Strange Birds writer Celia Pérez, “for kids who are just starting to encounter the scary things in the world and for adults who are still struggling with them.” The books don’t need complex allegories or meta-fictional conceits to attain the kind of narrative scope and emotional intelligence that Frog and Toad achieves. 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.

Frog and toad all year book