It’s something a lot of kids have to contend with. With Real Friends Hale zeroes in on a single aspect of childhood: friendship. In her Author’s Note at the end Shannon says that “ Real Friends it he story I’ve been telling myself about my elementary school years,” yet also acknowledges that “memories aren’t 100 percent accurate.” She mentions that the idea of writing a memoir was a relatively recent one considering the fact that from a drama perspective she had a pretty stable home life.

But that’s the thing about true friends sometimes. Figuring out if she’s out or in can be exhausting for Shannon, and that’s before you even consider her violently unpredictable older sister Wendy or her own OCD. That includes Jenny, Jen’s best friend and a dyed-in-the-wool bully to Shannon. Suddenly Shannon, Adrienne, a popular girl named Jen, and a whole bunch of other girls are in The Group. Yet when third grade rolled around, things started to change. You sit next to someone in Kindergarten and suddenly they’re your best friend for all time. When you’re really little, making friends is easy. The seriously-why-is-this-so-freaking-DIFFICULT!? Now Shannon Hale joins the illustrious crew with a book that zeroes in a single topic: friendship. Sure, there aren’t a ton of these books out there, but they sure pep up the autobiography assignment, I can assure you of that.

Authors started writing more autobiographies and, glory be, they were done in a graphic novel format!!! Smile and Sisters by Raina Telgemeier, Sunny Side Up by Jenni Holm, El Deafo by Cece Ball, and The Dumbest Idea Ever by Jimmy Gownley. Then, like magic, something changed overnight. Not like there was a lot to pick and choose from. So depending on the age of the child I’d load them down with Knots in My Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli or Marshfield Dreams by Ralph Fletcher or maybe one of the Beverly Cleary ones like A Girl From Yamhill. As it happens, middle grade authors of books for kids really like writing autobiographies. So like any good librarian I’d take the child to the biography/autobiography section and we’d start to hunt and peck. An AUTObiography, see? And there, clear as crystal, was the printed assignment. You mean a biography? No (of course not, silly librarian). A small child would walk into my room, belly up to the reader’s advisory desk, and ask for an autobiography. About ten years ago, when I was a children’s librarian in New York City, it was to be feared. I don’t pretend to know precisely why teachers give it out or what they hope child readers will get out of it.

Real friends graphic novel series