Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 09/01/2022 *Starred Review* What matters most to best friends? It’s not your nose or clothes; it’s not your hair, your house, or what you eat for lunch. Using a lighthearted tone, two friends reject the outward indicators that many people use to judge others. Do you like polka dots or floral prints? Do you dance funny? When you paint a cow, does it look like a bunny? Best friends do not care. They do care about playing fair, about wishing and singing, about feeling sad, worried, or mad. Best friends like to play together, catch frogs carefully, or have a picnic. Fogliano's sprightly, rhythmic text sets a fun tone for exploring what really matters in friendship. While effective picture books grow from the combining of words and images, this book takes the collaboration a step further by drawing on the talents of real-life best friends and Caldecott honorees Idle and Martinez-Neal. In humorous notes, the two describe their artistic process and shared design of each page of the book. Using their favorite colors, teal and yellow, with graphite, the linocut illustrations seamlessly expand on Fogliano’s narrative. The result is a warm, loving celebration of how to be a friend, and a successful artistic experiment. - Copyright 2022 Booklist.

School Library Journal - 11/18/2022 Gr 1–3—In silken soft graphite scenes with teal and yellow highlights, two children—each drawn by one of the two illustrators to be self representative—deliver a lesson in values that also happens to be as moving a declaration of close friendship as ever was. Like their expressions, which start out as scowls but change partway through to smiles and exchanged glances, the incantatory lines begin in forbidding tones ("i [sic] really don't care what you think of my hair/ or my eyes or my toes or my nose") but shift key for the important things: "i really do care/ that you always play fair…," going on to "and i care if you smile/ and i care if you're sad/ and i care if you're worried/ and i care if you're mad," on the way to "and i care that we're always/ and i care that we're two/ and i care that we're friends/ and i care that we're true." The lighter haired of the twosome is ambiguously gendered, and along with being easy on the eyes and written in language and cadences that particularly lend themselves to choral reading, this warm, wise, lyrical expression of togetherness is refreshingly clear of the sentimentality that goops up such similarly themed titles as Carmela Coyle's Do Princesses Have Best Friends Forever? or Monica Sheehan's Love Is You & Me. VERDICT A psychologically acute tally of friendship's most solid foundations, worth sharing with audiences large or small and tailor-made for reading aloud.—John Edward Peters - Copyright 2022 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.