"What you love will always be with you."Sigh.This one really gets going halfway through with a boy's reflections on where his friend the snowman has gone after melting. I love the connection of the melting snow to water to fog, that the snowman is still in the world in different forms, as well as in the boy's memory and experience and heart.Great for a child who's lost something too. Alison McGhee has a gift for the bittersweetly transcendent. In SOMEDAY, she imagines the life of a girl as she grows from baby to toddler to student to young adult to mother and beyond. In MAKING A FRIEND, a boy literally makes a friend—a snowman—only for the snowman to vanish with the coming spring. With the refrain, 'What you love will always be with you,' she subtly describes not only the permanence of love but also the transformation of the snowman into the various seasons' rain and mist and, eventually, snow again. It's the story of a death and a glimpse of the eternal, and that's why this mom can't hold it together while reading either one of these books. My four-year-old daughter, however, simply sees it as a swell story about a boy and his snowman. Five stars.
What do You think about Making A Friend (2011)?
sweet story about a boy and a snowman and what happens when it melts away.
—jesssmith2000
Charming, gentle story that makes you want to build a snowman.
—buuks
