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I think if you asked, most adults would confess to having imaginary friends or to knowing someone who had one. But what if those imaginary friends weren’t so much imaginary as simply forgotten? Then you might have a story something like this. Olivia has traveled to her grandmother’s house in Australia for only the second time in her life. She was five when she was first there nearly 6 years ago but she can’t seem to be able to remember anything about that visit. Until she gets to her upstairs room and opens the closet to find Bob.
Bob is a small greenish creature who looks a bit like a zombie and has been dutifully living in the closet since Livy ushered him inside six years ago and promised him she’d be right back. Now that she’s finally returned the two friends have a lot of catching up to do. Slowly things start to come back to Livy and she realizes Bob’s magic both made her forget and is now helping her to remember. But they haven’t been able to figure out just who (or what) Bob is or how to help him get back home (wherever that might be) or how to help her grandmother who is going to lose her farm because of the years long drought they’ve been experiencing. It’s not until Livy and Bob are lead to a well while searching for a neighbor boy that’s gone missing that they find all the answers.
There’s something sweetly magical about this little tale. It feels like it could be loosely based on a folktale but seems to be something original, from the minds of two award-winning authors. I’d love to know more about their process of writing this story. It’s told from both Bob’s and Livy’s points of view so perhaps each took charge of one of the characters. However it came to be its utterly charming and deserves wide readership. Check it out!
Written by: Wendy Mass & Rebecca Stead
Illustrated by: Nicholas Gannon
Number of Pages: 201
Publisher: Feiwel and Friends, 2018
Age Range: 6-10
Rating: 4/5
Looking for more suggestions for books about imaginary friends? Try the brilliantly executed The Adventures of Beekle by Dan Santat, or Patricia Polacco’s Emma Kate.