Story #38: 🐸 Frog and toad
Two mirror-image sentences
This week’s story will be a quick one, because it’s been A Week over here. Let’s get right to it.
The story
I’ve been reading Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books with kiddo. They’re funny, witty, charming. Sometimes we learn a life lesson from the story, but mostly we’re just allowed to be entertained by them.1
Basically, there are two characters, Frog and Toad. Frog and Toad are friends. Frog is the larger, greener of the two, optimistic and up for adventure. Toad is smaller, browner and more curmudgeonly.
The books are meant for early readers, or not-quite-readers. That means no contractions and lots of repetition. It only adds to the charm of the story.
These pages come from Frog and Toad All Year, from a story called “Down the Hill.” In this story, Frog wants to go sledding with Toad, but Toad wants to stay in bed. Toad’s excuse is that he has no winter clothes, which is where we enter the story.
We’re going to focus on the sentences circled in blue.
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Why it works
These sentences are mirror images of each other, and they’re perfect.
First, look at the verbs. Lobel uses the opposites of push/pull, and puts them in the same place in each sentence:
Frog pushed a coat down over the top of Toad.
Frog pulled snowpants up over the bottom of Toad.
Next, Lobel uses opposite directions for where the winter clothing is going, with down/up:
Frog pushed a coat down over the top of Toad.
Frog pulled snowpants up over the bottom of Toad.
Finally, he adds one more variation. Now we get a quaternity of opposites: down/up and top/bottom between sentences, and also down/top and up/bottom within the sentences.
Frog pushed a coat down over the top of Toad.
Frog pulled snowpants up over the bottom of Toad.
All those opposites, all that structure crammed into two simple sentences where the longest word has two syllables. And all the directions inject momentum into the sentences, beyond what is implied by the verbs push/pull.
These sentences feel perfectly architected. Lobel’s established his structure and he’s playing within it. It’s all about pairs: a pair of sentences that play with opposites (by definition, requiring a relationship between a pair), in a book that is about a pair of amphibians.
But let’s remember that children’s books are meant to be read aloud. So stop right now and read these sentences out loud. I’ll wait.
Or, listen to Adam from the Magical Theatre Company read them (notice his face when he says “over the bottom of Toad”):
Fun, right? It’s hard not to smile when you get to the second sentence. Maybe it’s the repetition2, the image it creates in your head, and because hilarity ensues when stories reference a Toad’s bottom.3
What we can learn from it
First, that it’s always funny to read the word “bottom” in a children’s book. Would that have been extra edgy (and therefore extra hilarious) in 1976, when this story was published? Maybe.
Second, that you can work magic into the smallest sentences.
Third, that everyone deserves good sentences. Even those of us who can’t read yet. Maybe, especially, those of us who can’t read yet.
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Which is a relief, because so many kids’ books these days have A Message. Which is helpful, because sometimes you need a book to explain a difficult thing. But sometimes you just want a story, or to play with rhyme and rhythm, and it seems like so much of that gets lost in a book that is about A Message, as noble as that message might be.
As we discussed with anaphora in Story #32, stories written for the ear have to have extra structure to provide guidance.
It was surprisingly difficult to find a good reading of “Down the Hill” on YouTube. In several videos, the readers bungle these two sentences, dropping some of the smaller words that are responsible for the mirrored structure.
However, I am happy to report that in most of the readings, Frog and Toad get different voices, and Toad’s voice is usually the deeper one. This agrees with how I read the story, and is clearly the correct interpretation.
The Magic Theatre Company version above has the added detail of Frog (but not Toad) having an English accent.