This is a sweet bedtime number, with a very human, lightly delivered text and artwork that carries the reader away to a toasty, gladdening home. Mama can’t sleep. She shuffles into her pink bunny slippers and stares at Grandma’s birthday present, sitting there on the floor, neatly wrapped and “which she should have mailed yesterday.” Papa can’t sleep; he’s worried about the broken washing machine, which he goes to inspect. Teddy the teddy can’t sleep, because Max has rolled over on him, and Max can’t sleep “because the ghost behind the curtain is sighing,” and Sam the dog can’t sleep because of all the padding about. What’s to do but crawl into bed together (the ghost gets to hover nearby) and drift off, all wrapped in Papa’s embrace. The story is beautifully comforting in showing children that parents can be careworn without emotional trauma. Sure, everybody's got some problems, but they’ll wait. Putting an icing on the proceedings are the pastry-rich illustrations. Each two-page spread of heavy-gauge, high-gloss paper (extra-resistant to toddler drool) is a set piece, radiant with pigmentation and neat as a pin. And then there’s the parental bed, same as it ever was: Under those covers there is succor and surcease, your own little acre of milk and honey. (Picture book. 3-5)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7358-4015-7
Page Count: 24
Publisher: NorthSouth
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Though it looks like a book for longed-for children, it’s really for their parents.
A poetic ode to women who became mothers despite the challenges they faced.
Whether navigating the roughest seas, crossing the hottest deserts, or pushing through painful brambles, the mothers in this book know their long, hard journeys were worth the effort. There might have been failure and doubt, but now that it’s all over, they know they’d “do it all over again. For you.” First-person narration expresses in metaphor the extraordinary lengths some mothers will go to achieve their dream of holding a child in their arms. Sentimental and flowery, the text is broad enough to apply to the journeys of many mothers—even though the text is gender neutral, the illustrations clearly center the mother’s experience. At times another figure, often male-presenting, is shown alongside a mother. Soft, jewel-toned illustrations peppered with textures depict families with a variety of skin tones and hair colors/textures. The assortment of mothers shown demonstrates the universality of the message, but it also contributes to the absence of a strong visual throughline. In the concluding author’s note, Serhant shares her personal struggle to conceive her child, which included fertility treatments and IVF. Ultimately, although the sentiment is lovely, the message is too abstract to be understood by children and will be better received and appreciated by parents.
Though it looks like a book for longed-for children, it’s really for their parents. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-17388-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A particularly soppy, sloppy addition to an already-overstuffed genre.
A bear cub gets a load of lyrical loving from a lumbering parent in this nature walk.
Expressed in stumbling rhyme—“I love you more than trees / love to change with every season. / I love you more than anything. / I cannot name just one reason”—Benson’s perfervid sentiments accompany scenes of bear and cub strolling through stands of birch, splashing into a river to watch (just watch) fish, and, in a final moonlit scene, cuddling beneath starry skies. Foxes, otters, and other animal parents and offspring, likewise adoring, make foreground cameos along the way in Lambert’s neatly composed paper-collage–style illustrations. Since the bears are obvious stand-ins for humans (the cub even points at things and in most views is posed on two legs), the gender ambiguity in both writing and art allow human readers some latitude in drawing personal connections, but that’s not enough to distinguish this uninspired effort among the teeming swarm of “I Love You This Much!” titles.
A particularly soppy, sloppy addition to an already-overstuffed genre. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68010-022-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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