How Do I Love You?
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A rhyming story about a parent's unlimited love for a child -- in the same format as the bestselling book I Love You Through and Through, and with pictures by the same illustrator."How do I love you? Let me count the ways.I love you as the sun loves the bright blue days . . ."In this padded board book, a parent declares her love...as the bees love a flower, a duck loves a shower, a bird loves to sing, a bear loves the spring. Written by Newbery-award-winning author Marion Dane Bauer, inspired by the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and with pictures by Caroline Jayne Church, illustrator of the bestselling I Love You Through and Through.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The board book format with the padded cover promises a warm, nonthreatening message; the contents represent a superior delivery. Taking off from Browning's famous opening line ("Let me count the ways"), Bauer (On My Honor) compares a parent's love to the unchanging conditions of the natural world: "I love you as the bird/ loves a song to sing./ I love you as the waking bear/ loves the smell of spring." In what look like mixed-media collages, Church (Do Your Ears Hang Low?) uses fields of gentle textures as a foil for the central figure, a toddler with yellow ringlets and minimalist features, who watches the bird while holding her rabbit and sucking reflectively on her finger, then takes the hand of a bear whose snout is pointed skyward, ecstatically sniffing. Other humans are conspicuously absent, focusing attention on the girl's relationship to the landscape around her. In the final spread, she stands on a globe's curving surface, lit by the moon and stars; the speaker of the final lines ("I love all that you will be / and everything you are") isn't seen. The world seems hers alone. Ages 3 5.