Friendships can break your heart, when a friend leaves or dies or is disloyal. Can anyone read E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web without exploring again the meaning and treasure of friendship? Yes, friendships sometimes hurt and sometimes give hope.

Friends, real or imaginary, help us sing, whistle – or become brave even when we are afraid of what is hiding in the closet, making strange noises outside or creeping down the hall. A “best friend” might be ourselves.

Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, a courageous poem, is by Maya Angelou, who faced many scary dark places.

Friends can understand each other even when words and writing are different and look strange, as in the delightful story, Where Are You Going? To See My Friend written by two different friends, Eric Carle and Kazuo Iwamura.

Sometimes a friend helps us find “home,” even when a new home is not where we want to be, as Liyana discovers in Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Other times our search for home finds us a friend, such as in The Little Prince adapted from the original by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and illustrated as a graphic novel for young readers by Joanne Sfar (to be released October 2010.)