Friendship is not always an easy thing to navigate. Shannon Hale recalls her own real childhood in this memoir about the hazards of making friends. She becomes instant best friends with Adrienne in kindergarten, but it becomes a little more complicated in third grade when Adrienne becomes friends with the most popular girl in her class. Adrienne is welcomed at the top of the pack while Shannon is relegated to the bottom. Often others (particularly one) in “The Group” make fun of Shannon and try to undermine her. Meanwhile, at home, her oldest sister, Wendy, is alternately nice and abusive. Hale and Pham depict Wendy as a wild bear who could strike at any moment. Shannon has days where she spends recess crying in the bushes and gets home only to have to run from the bear. Her path is not always clear, but through all the messiness of real life, Shannon learns what it is to have and be a real friend.
I think sometimes we think of these social hierarchy problems (queen bees and wannabes) emerging in middle or high school, but I experienced them most strongly in elementary school, and it looks like Shannon Hale might have as well. I remember being phased out of the cool group when I was in third grade. As I saw Shannon’s pain, I felt it and related to it. LeUyen Pham notes in the acknowledgments, “my heart is still convinced that you [Hale] crawled inside my memories and handpicked all these events and feelings and insecurities from my childhood and called them your own.” I tend to think that the book will have this effect on many readers, as it did me. And while I had no siblings, the portrayal of her difficulties with her sister still affected me because of the authenticity of it. Hale deftly maneuvers through this story, and while the central focus is friendship (particularly female), she manages to touch on other complex subjects like anxiety, sister relationships, empathy, and identity.
In the lovely author’s note, Hale says, “Real Friends is the story I’ve been telling myself about my elementary school years. If you were to ask the other people portrayed in this book how it happened, surely the story they’ve been telling themselves would be different from mine.” She provides a little extra context and some follow up on some of the people in the story, like Wendy. She wraps it up by encouraging her readers, “You deserve to have real friends.”
Then there are the illustrations! It’s so easy to take illustrations for granted. LeUyen Pham's illustrations brim with life. She captures all the emotions so brilliantly in her drawings. She knows how to use color and space to accentuate and depict the story. She incorporates the bear and dreamy fantasy sequences seamlessly. I can’t do her work justice!
And did I mention it was so engaging I read it in one sitting? Regardless of whatever personal, emotional impact this may have had on me, this is one fantastic little book.
