04/01/2016
Toddler-PreS—Mama Bear takes her cub on a full day of adventure with vivid cut-paper collage to set the scenes. With the sun high in a grove of birch trees, they travel to the mountains, river, and waterfall while Mama Bear explains how much she loves her baby bear: "I love you more than trees love to change with every season." Her love grows and grows until at the end of the day, with stars in the sky, she says, "I love you, baby, more and more with every precious day." The illustrations depict the bears in delightful woodland scenes, surrounded by an array of forest animals. Each spread sports half of a rhyming couplet, the second half of which is supplied with a page turn. They flow smoothly despite an occasional stumble in the rhythm. The book is reminiscent of Sam McBratney's Guess How Much I Love You, but the titles are not necessarily read-alikes. VERDICT This cute addition for most collections will tug at parents' heartstrings.—Karen Ginman, BookOps: The New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library
2016-03-16
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)
02/15/2016
Benson and Lambert follow a bear and its offspring through a day in the forest in this reassuring ode from parent to child. While Benson’s rhymes skirt the edge of syrupy now and again (“I love you more than trees love to change with every season./ I love you more than anything—I cannot name just one reason”) they also conjure a strong sense of a parent’s unconditional love. Lambert’s crisp-edged, gently textured digital collages are tender without being overly sweet, highlighting the love between these bears, along with several other forest creatures including foxes, otters, and rabbits. Ages 2–5. (Mar.)
