Friendship Is Universal in Joan Walsh Anglund's A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You

What exactly constitutes a friend? Writer-illustrator Joan Walsh Anglund explores this question in the classic gift book A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You. Like many of her books, this one, originally published in 1958, is fairly tiny. While it’s on the tall side for this type of book, it’s only half as wide as it is tall, and its 26 pages include significant amounts of whitespace. Still, while this won’t take long to read, it is a charming book that shares a sweet sentiment through adorable pictures.

As is pretty typical for her books, this one includes a mix of color and black-and-white drawings. The pages alternate on this, with the black-and-white illustrations generally being the larger, more detailed ones. While I’m always in favor of color, my favorite picture happens to be one of the black-and-white ones. Featuring a girl placidly sitting by the creek and gazing out over the farmland on which rests a large barn, it presents a perfect picture of rural beauty. Of the color drawings, I love the one with the little girl being buffeted about by a strong autumn wind. Both pictures have a Wyeth-esque quality to them that I find very appealing.

Anglund’s artistic style is easy to recognize, especially when it includes people. Her characters – usually children – have wide faces, rosy cheeks and tiny black eyes. In most cases, they lack visible mouths, but they somehow seem all the more expressive for it. Given the theme of the book, we have people on every page, though not every example of a friend in this book is a person or even an animal. Instead, Anglund finds examples of perceived friendliness in natural landmarks such as trees and streams. She’s anthropomorphizing, but anyone who was a loner as a child will probably be able to relate to the way that these things can almost feel like friends to one who spends a great deal of time in solitary pursuits. I know John Denver once described the “out-of-doors” as his “first and truest friend.”

Because she counts even the wind as a friend, I guess it’s not too much of a stretch for her to assert that everyone has at least one friend, though I found myself thinking of Archibald Asparagus’s objections after Larry sang the VeggieTales Silly Song The Water Buffalo Song, reminded of the dangers of using such broad terms. “How can you say everybody’s got a friend when everybody does not have a friend?” I imagine him protesting. Nonetheless, everyone should have at least one friend, and this book offers some suggestions on how to make that happen if friends seem scarce.

As someone who is shy, I appreciated Anglund’s nod to folks like me who aren’t so skilled in getting a conversation started. “Sometimes you don’t know who are your friends,” she writes. “Sometimes they are there all the time, but you walk right past them and don’t notice that they like you in a special way.” While many of the pictures feature children in isolation, the ones that most effectively convey the idea of friendliness show two or more of them together, clearly enjoying each other’s company. My favorite of these closes the book with two girls dressed in pink and green, arms around each other’s shoulders and gazing out at the world where more friends are waiting to be found.

Anglund has a fairly minimalist writing style, and sometimes, her words have the appearance of free verse poetry. This is not the most poetic of her books, but she does seem to have put some thought into where each line ends and which words will complement each other well. Yes, even the words themselves feel friendly here. While I wish I couple more pages had been devoted to human friendships, especially considering the fact that many people probably buy this specifically to give to a friend, I find this book suitably sweet, and going by her simple definition, Anglund has a friend in me.