School Library Journal Review
Toddler-PreS-A sweet affirmation of a parent's love for a child. Starting with rabbits on the edge of a forest near a garden, readers follow several animal parents and their young through the forest. Eventually, the book comes back to the garden, where a mother and child have been working all day. The soft pencil and gouache illustrations show adorable animals playing gently. Each animal gets a quartet of three-word sentences echoing messages of love. This pattern is mostly effective, but it does make for a few awkward phrases. The mama duck, for example, says, "I swim you./I hop you./I start you./I stop you." However, since this title would work well for one-on-one lap reading, it may be a nice way to encourage parents and children to come up with their own three-word phrases to describe their feelings. VERDICT A wonderful choice that will be most appreciated by those looking for a tender family read.-Laura Stanfield, Campbell County Public Library, Fort Thomas, KY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Fleming coaxes remarkable emotion out of three-word sentences in a lovely debut, constructing poetic mini-narratives involving parent-child pairs. Most of those pairs are animals: the first pages show a young rabbit racing back to the family den with a stolen carrot for a tender reunion ("I see you./ I miss you./ I hug you./ I kiss you"). A few pages later, two bears tussle before the older one serves as an ad hoc stepladder so its child can pick an apple from a tree ("I chase you./ I slow you./ I lift you./ I grow you"). Working in pencil and gouache, Wright (A Christmas Goodnight) creates an enchanting rural landscape, concluding with gentle scenes of a mother and daughter watching fireflies fill the air. Up to age 8. Agent: Emily van Beek, Folio Literary Management. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
