I Love You Like .

by Lori Joy Smith

Overview

A garden sprite comes across a garden gnome, and falls in love. She takes the gnome on a playful journey through the forest, across the hills, to the beach, and further still. All the while, she expresses how she loves him: like flowers love the sun, like forests love a seed, like balloons love the sky. These inventive similes play on concepts drawn from nature and are paired with quirky, whimsical art full of details to discover—like the troubling moment when the gnome becomes cracked, but is mended with some ingenuity and the help of cheerful forest friends.



Moving progressively through the seasons, from spring to winter, the book is a sweet, bright bedtime story, paced to read aloud. I Love You Like... can help inspire readers to invent their own creative expressions of love as part of a nighttime ritual and will also be relatable to any child who adores a favorite toy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771471572
Publisher:	Owlkids Books
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	2 - 5 Years

About the Author

LORI JOY SMITH is a PEI artist and the illustrator of My Canada. Lori has several picture books to her credit and illustrates regularly for Chirp Magazine. She has also illustrated for American Girl Magazine and for TV (Sing, Dance and Play with Bobs and Lolo).

Editorial Reviews

"With a full palette of prettily muted colours, the joyful energy contained in the illustrations is a pleasing complement to the eccentric feel of the text."

Atlantic Books Today

"I Love You Like is an extremely child-centered text with the potential to empower its readers. It would make a highly effective anchor for Language Arts classroom activities related to poetry and creative writing. It deserves a place in every library, classroom, and bedside bookshelf.

Canadian Review of Materials

2018-02-19
A new garden addition becomes a sprite's beloved friend. The first two spreads are wordless: A gardener, seen from the neck down, places a roly-poly gnome decoration on a stump. From the window of a miniature house, an excited sprite watches. The turn of the page shows the tiny figure exiting the house and then lovingly setting off with her new friend in her arms, later shifted to the basket on her back, a content and loving smile on her face. (The sprite is gendered only in the flap copy; her blue shirt, brown pants, red conical hat, and pageboy haircut could belong to either gender, though she does have pronounced eyelashes.) The sprite expresses her love for her inanimate friend using nature similes: "I love you… // Like raindrops love a puddle, // Like moss loves a tree, / Like mushrooms love the shade, // Like fur loves a cuddle." This last shows the sprite and her gnome held softly within the curl of a squirrel's tail. The seasons pass, and it's an early winter's evening as the duo heads back to the cozy cottage. Smith's rhymes and rhythms are often rough, and the similes are sometimes nonsensical: "Like quiet loves the snow"; "Like a pillow loves to sleep." Bright colors with lots of charming details—smiling insects and flora—fill the spreads.Just one of many picture books about expressions of love, it's not likely to become a favorite. (Picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Reviews

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