THE NEW FRIEND

"I had a friend/ a dear friend/ with long brown hair," Zolotow begins, and then proceeds to describe their idyllic times, picking wildflowers in the woods and so on. But then the friend takes up with another friend. The narrator cries, then dreams of a new friend for herself, and wakes to look for her. ". . . Maybe then I won't care!" McCully's drawings make the friends and their activities appealing, but the story, first published with different illustrations in 1968, remains cloyingly "sensitive" and, as our 1968 review noted, lugubrious and misdirected as well. (And when was the last time one kid called another a "dear friend?")