We Are (Not) Friends by Anna Kang, Illustrated by Christopher Weyant

Photo courtesy of
Robbin Friedman

Robbin Friedman is a children's librarian at the Chappaqua Library. She writes reviews for School Library Journal, serves on ALSC's Budget Committee, and reads a lot of science fiction.

We Are (Not) Friends by Anna Kang,
illustrated by Christopher Weyant book cover

Geisel Award-winning team Anna Kang and Christopher Weyant return with another fuzzy monster book, the third companion to You Are (Not) Small. After the crystalline simplicity of the winning first title, We Are (Not) Friends broaches slightly more complicated territory, in both emotional and literary content.


The early reading foundations of Kang and Weyant’s work remain the same. The story unfolds as dialogue between three characters, mostly printed in a large, well-spaced serif typeface. Jaunty lines connect the speaker to each instance of dialogue; sound effects and a few shouts appear in a legible, handwritten typeface. Variations in font size, occasional italics, and underlined words guide the reader’s emotional expression, while remaining comprehensible.

Image from We Are (Not) Friends by Anna Kang,
illustrated by Christopher Weyant

Still, We Are (Not) Friends introduces a layer of difficulty beyond the earlier text. The story examines the challenges--emotional and logistical--that come from bringing new friends into an existing relationship. Over the course of the narrative, alliances shift and the two original friends each experience feeling slighted and jealous before settling into a happy trio. This story of friendship, kindness, and hurt feelings will resonate with most beginning readers, who may also be beginners at cultivating relationships and reacting to other people’s emotions. But the dynamics reverse quickly, and readers new to decoding text will also have to decode the illustrations to understand when the three creatures feel excluded, or sad, or excited. The open faces and expressive body language, set against uncluttered backgrounds, offer readers ample clues to the characters’ emotions, but readers will still need to know what to do with that information.

Image from We Are (Not) Friends by Anna Kang, 
illustrated by Christopher Weyant

As with the earlier texts, Kang keeps the sentences short, employing sight words and repetition. But not every vocabulary word gets enough support and in one case, it may affect the reader’s experience. Early on in the book, newcomer Blue hands Yellow a cane (a la Fred Astaire) and suggests “We can do a duet.” This two-person activity, proposed while all three characters are together, sets the stage for the jealousy and exclusion that come next. But will beginning readers recognize the word “duet” (or know how to pronounce it)? Will they identify that it separates two characters from the third? The illustrations pull a lot of weight on the following spread, depicting Purple’s growing discontent at being left out. But the book never returns to the crucial piece of vocabulary, so readers likely won’t have understood the new term in context, or learn it for the future. Other terms--two-seater, dinosaur, attack--fall well outside any standard sight-word list.

As a relatable saga, We Are (Not) Friends pairs tension and humor, a great combination to induce Geisel-criteria page-turning to the very end. And the final turn (familiar to readers of Chester’s Way, among others) will satisfy most readers. People looking for age-appropriate tales of navigating friendship will find this book charming, funny, and emotionally astute. But the Geisel Committee, looking for scaffolding and success, probably won’t call for an encore.