(++++) GETTING ALONG

Who Needs Friends? By Jia Liu. Nancy Paulsen Books. $18.99.

Dirt and Bugsy 1: Bug Catchers. By Megan Litwin. Illustrated by Shauna Lynn Panczyszyn. Penguin Young Readers. $4.99.

Dirt and Bugsy 2: Beetle Mania. By Megan Litwin. Illustrated by Shauna Lynn Panczyszyn. Penguin Young Readers. $5.99.

     Grown-ups know how difficult it can be to make friends in adult life, and may look back fondly to the comparative ease with which they remember forming friendships as children. The rose-colored glasses of hindsight are not, however, entirely clear. Jia Liu has figured out that making friends can be harder for some kids than others, and can actually be looked at as a skill to be learned. And so she has created Who Needs Friends? It is a simple, easy-to-read, brightly illustrated book that, like so many kids’ books on potentially difficult topics, uses animals as stand-ins for children in order to make its message more appealing. It is the story of a bird named Merlin – apparently a young owl, but one that is active during the daytime. Merlin decides one day to fly into the forest and latch onto some friendships. However, the first hint that things may not go Merlin’s way shows up immediately, as Merlin cheerfully calls out, “Hi there! I’m Merlin!” – while the many woodland birds on branches, in nests, and in and around trees are all talking and singing to each other incomprehensibly (Liu creates all sorts of unreadable symbols for their communication, often mingling those symbols with musical notes). Undeterred, Merlin decides to put his best feet (and wings) forward, telling the other birds a story, talking about a game he likes to play because he is so good at it, and otherwise coming on just a bit too intensely. The other birds put up with him for a little while but soon go their own way, returning to their previous interactions and leaving Merlin to declare, “I DON’T NEED FRIENDS!” Friends, he decides, are noisy and demanding and insist on doing things together instead of providing the “true freedom” you get when you are on your own. But as Liu quickly makes clear in both words and art – showing a disconsolate Merlin alone on a high tree limb, with no other birds nearby – Merlin is not really happy being all by himself. And then things change: it rains, and Merlin notices a single nearby bird struggling to grab a large worm for a quick snack, and Merlin offers to help. Sure enough, Merlin and the other bird, Billy, can grab the worm together and share it. And then, quite naturally, they start to talk together and make jokes and play games that they both want to play, and Merlin realizes that “it sure is good to have a friend!” So all ends happily – and to be sure the friendship lesson is learned, Liu includes some back-of-the-book recommendations for making friends, such as “don’t be a bossy bird,” “listen as much as you squawk,” and “share your worms.” Those might not translate directly to human children seeking friendship, but kids will certainly get the basic ideas right after reading Who Needs Friends? And of course the answer to the book’s title question is twofold: Merlin does – and so do kids.

     Merlin and Billy build their friendship on shared interests – and that sort of sharing can involve just about anything. Even bugs. The friendship explorations of two kids named Dirt and Bugsy are of the insect kind – as Megan Litwin and Shauna Lynn Panczyszyn show in two Level 2 easy-reader chapter books called Bug Catchers and Beetle Mania. Thin, written in very simple sentences that are shown in large type (as befits Level 2 books), these little stories are explicitly about something the friends love doing together and implicitly about the notion of building friendships on activities of mutual enjoyment. In Bug Catchers, the boys search for, find, catch and release bugs of all sorts, enjoying themselves outdoors until it starts to rain – at which point they invent a “bug barn” to keep insects dry during the storm. “They make big rooms and small rooms and rooms in between.” But then they realize that they have no bugs for the barn! So they search and spy and dig and lift and sift and “catch all kinds of bugs in no time at all,” giving each one an amusing name (“King Flappy,” “Miss Lolly Pop,” and so forth) and creating some games to play while the rain continues – after which they let all the bugs go, to be caught again another day. Then, in Beetle Mania, the friends specifically focus on finding beetles, which turns out to be easy because there are so many of them. Dirt and Bugsy quickly accumulate a collection – but what should they do now? They decide to play a sorting game, but Bugsy wants to sort by color and Dirt wants to sort by size. Uh-oh – a small disagreement! The boys try to work things out, deciding that “sorting is harder than catching.” Then they get a new idea: sort the beetles into ones they love and ones they don’t love! Of course, all the beetles end up in the “love” category, so everyone is happy – presumably including the beetles, which the boys release at the end of the day so they can scurry and flap and crawl away, once more with the idea that Dirt and Bugsy will catch them again at another time. Kids who already have friends – not necessarily bug-catching ones – will enjoy these simple outdoor adventures, and perhaps come up with some ideas of their own for sharing mutual areas of interest with their own friends.