I LOVE YOU AMERICANLY
by Lynn Parrish Sutton ; illustrated by Melanie Hope Greenberg
An adverbial tour from sea to shining sea.
As in Sutton’s similarly constructed I Love You Animally (illustrated by Hazel Mitchell, 2015), the repetition of “I love you” quickly transforms sweet sentiment into monotonous litany. The text darts back and forth over the continent as the author struggles, with only fitful success, to find rhyming locales to highlight: “I love you energetically like NYC. // I love you simply like the stark Mohave. / I love you anciently like the Southwestern ruins. / I love you greatly like the Colorado dunes,” etc. Most of the selected adverbs are interchangeable anyway, and many are either arbitrary (“I love you diversely like the Texas Big Bend”) or esoteric. Greenburg’s simple images help out with some of the latter, such as “I love you duckily like the Public Garden’s flowers” (think Robert McCloskey), but the illustrator depicts a cannon instead of a “Gettysburg mortar,” forces a batter into a painfully awkward swing, and closes with a perfunctory map on which only a few of the journey’s stops appear. She does use a range of pinks and browns to color in the faces of her small human figures.
Thoroughly misconceived and poorly executed.
(Picture book. 5-7)