Frog and Toad Are Friends
Written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel
HarperCollins
1970

Owl at Home
Written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel
HarperCollins
1975

Mouse Tales
Written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel
HarperCollins
1978

Reviewed by Frances Maclean

When I first decided I was going to write about old and/or otherwise overlooked children’s books – great stories that had since become either lost or forgotten – one of the first book memories that came to mind was a story about a boy (although something told me that the boy might have been a mouse, I couldn’t be sure) who was spending the day watching clouds in the sky. At some point in the story I remembered one of the clouds transformed into a menacing shape which frightened the living daylights out of the boy (maybe mouse). Without recalling the specific plot of the story, I mostly remembered the dreamy expansive mood; the spacious sky, the deliciously slow pace of time, and then the sudden (shocking) fright of the imagination. I spent a lot of time trawling through book searches online looking for children’s books about clouds (there are a surprising number) but found nothing that resembled the cloudy fragments of story I had in my head. Sadly, I began to believe this story was well and truly lost to me.

One of my favourite resources for learning about new (and old) children’s books is an ongoing radio segment on New Zealand’s National Radio. These illuminating conversations are between Kim Hill (high priestess of New Zealand public radio, as well as host of Saturday Mornings with Kim Hill) and Kate De Goldi, writer and children’s book critic who has an almost magical talent for finding book treasures and bringing them into the light. It’s during one of these conversations that I first heard about Arnold Lobel (you can find the audio link here: Kate De Goldi and Kim Hill discuss Arnold Lobel).

And like De Goldi, I was completely charmed by Lobel’s writing and illustrations. There was also something familiar about the pictures – some back-of-the-mind suggestion that they’d been around forever, although the books featured above were all created during the comparatively recent 1970s.

Frog and Toad Are Friends is a collection of stories about an amphibious friendship between reasonable, thoughtful Frog and the more emotional, sensory-seeking, and child-like Toad who possesses his own simple Toad-logic. In one of the stories, Letter, Toad is sad because he is waiting for the mailman who never brings any letters. Frog rushes home to write Toad a letter and then posts it to him. Learning that Frog’s letter is on the way (as well as learning exactly what the letter says), Toad happily waits with Frog until the mail finally arrives. As George Shannon writes in his book Arnold Lobel (published by Twayne Publishers in 1989 as part of their Twayne’s United States Author Series) “while most picture books about friendship (including many fine ones) deal with the issues of making friends, fighting and making up with friends, or losing friends, Lobel evokes Frog and Toad’s friendship by dramatizing their daily lives”. It seems that Lobel is not writing a friendship as he thinks it should be, rather a friendship that simply is.

Owl At Home, on the other hand, is about a lone owl navigating through his night-time world. With nobody to tell him otherwise, he must make sense of the world himself, but for a night creature he is unusually anxious and unworldy. In the story Strange Bumps, for instance, he is frightened by his own feet under the blankets, and in Tear Water Tea he purposefully makes himself cry, thinking of all the saddest things he possibly can (“spoons
that have fallen behind the stove and are never seen again”; “mornings nobody saw because everybody was sleeping”; “pencils that are too short to use”). All so he can happily drink a good cup of the special (if a little salty) tea.

As Lobel himself is quoted by Shannon as saying: “When I can put myself into a frame of mind to be able to share with the reader my problems and my own sense of life’s travail, then I discover that I am working in top form.”

About three-quarters of the way through Shannon’s book I slowly realized I had found my missing cloud story (in Mouse Tales). It was a Lobel story all along – in top form, naturally.