I AM A GOOD FRIEND

A girl who thinks she’s a friend to the animals realizes she isn’t much of one and tries to make things right.

A little girl with beige skin and wavy brown hair is such an animal lover that she has a framed picture of her pals—two squirrels, a snail, and three crows—hanging on the wall at her house. But when she goes outside to play with them, she inadvertently makes their lives difficult. For starters, although she announces that “squirrels love to play hide-and-seek with nuts,” dialogue balloons translated from squirrel-speak show the two animals grousing, “She dug up our nuts!” and “Why is she always doing this?” The girl demonstrates similar cluelessness while interacting with the snail. Finally, after a crow makes off with her sandwich, she reflects on her day and realizes that her shenanigans have hindered her animal friends’ abilities to access their food—they’re hungry!—so she fixes her mistakes. Climo’s scrupulously clean, cartoonish digital art can do only so much for a story that’s herky-jerky and confusing due to its changing perspectives and the ambush of running text, dialogue balloons, thought bubbles, and free-floating friendship mottoes (“Friends should not keep friends waiting” is one of several scattered throughout the book). One senses that a sturdier friendship story wouldn’t need the mottoes, which are sometimes used wryly, or the protagonist’s expository monologues to get the point across.

Good message, flawed delivery system.