I Love You Like Crazy Cakes

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4 SEPT 2000

Lewis's sweetly sentimental picture-book debut plays out like a love letter to her adopted Chinese daughter. As she recalls the events leading up to their first meeting ("I had been waiting for you my whole life")--the letters to foreign officials, the baby picture she received, the flight to China with other excited soon-to-be parents--and describes their joyous homecoming, she taps into a well of genuine emotion, not surprisingly, since her account is based on her own experience. Like Jamie Lee Curtis's Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born, the book offers abundant reassurances of love to adopted children, even if at times it seems more concerned with the feelings of the adult narrator than with those of the child ("How did someone make this perfect match a world away? Did the Chinese people have a special window to my soul?"). Dyer's (When Mama Comes Home Tonight) watercolors are almost meltingly tender. Whether depicting an airplane soaring against a star-spangled night sky, a round-cheeked child enthralled with a room full of toys or an embrace shared by the newly bonded mother and child, the clear, bright colors and clean lines of her portraits are immensely appealing. Ages 4-8.