My Best Friend Is a Butternut Squash – written by Heather Smith, illustrated by Kass Reich
Tundra Books, 2026
It’s hard to see how the title of Heather Smith and Kass Reich’s new picture book could not be intriguing. Is it literal, or a metaphor? Children sometimes develop attachments to unusual toys, or, in psychological parlance, “transitional objects.” In My Best Friend is a Butternut Squash, a boy named Alex adopts the vegetable of the title, and grants it personhood with crayons and imagination. Soon he is taking it out for walks in a stroller and identifying him, when asked, as a two-month-old baby.
Like a purely imaginary friend, the butternut squash can be a different age on different days. One day Alex cradles it in his arms; the next day they are twins, dressing alike and anticipating one another’s thoughts and words. Alex’s mom is really good-natured, even bestowing a kiss on this beloved companion. There is no limit to the possibilities for dramatic entertainment, including a “spectacular sword fight” that is completely harmless. Reich’s gouache and colored pencil drawings capture a child’s point of view, but they are also sophisticated, matching the expression on Alex’s face with that of his endlessly flexible friend, who can be a fairy, a pirate, or even a doctor. The doctor scenario has a bit of heartbreak. Like all children, Alex experiences anxiety, answering the squash-doctor’s question about his symptoms with the troubling answer, “It’s my heart…Sometimes I think it’s shrinking.” The squash wisely advises Alex not to worry, reassuring him that he has “a very big heart,” a quality the reader has already suspected about this sensitive boy.
The butternut squash has a backstory. His original home was Alex’s grandfather’s garden. Maybe uprooting him has created problems that Alex had not suspected, like being excluded from games in the schoolyard. Other children don’t necessarily share Alex’s “big heart,” in accepting the inevitable square peg who won’t fit the round hole, especially if he is an item of produce in a human world. When Alex meets Trudy, he learns that her special object is an old alarm clock, with the disturbingly personified accident of broken hands. Then the other shoe drops, with Alex admitting that the butternut squash’s eventual fate is to be compost. Uh oh.
Just when adults reading this charmingly idiosyncratic book with children might become concerned, the kids work it out. Alex and Trudy find a solution to the transient nature of squashes, clocks, and maybe everything. They defy convention and create their own universe of play, where art supplies and affection are more important than fitting in.
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