cover image Little Friends

Little Friends

Onur Tukel. Marshall Cavendish, $14.99 (64p) ISBN 978-0-7614-6260-6

Louisa and Sara are BFFs, but their odd neighbor Barry, a boy with a ghostly white face who “rarely talked to anyone,” also intrigues them. A quarrel over the rights to a tire swing seems to signal a permanent standoff, but the girls’ openheartedness and Barry’s yearning for connection triumph, and by the end of the first of this book’s three seasonally themed chapters, the children are fast friends. Tukel, an independent filmmaker and animator making his book debut, understands how friendships play out, in both a literal and figurative sense; while the interactions between the kids aren’t eloquent, they feel authentic, whether it’s the girls’ confusion over Barry’s invented game, or Barry’s consistently prickly responses to Louisa and Sara’s ideas. The quirky cheer of Tukel’s drawings (which bring to mind the old Nickelodeon cartoon The Wild Thornberrys) and his confident, comics-style framing come together most satisfyingly in the second story, “The Snow Fortress,” in which Louisa and Sara prove that ingenuity can eventually overcome even the most freakishly talented snowball hurler. Ages 7–9. (Apr.)