Join us Saturday, October 23 as we welcome author and storyteller Lindsay Bonilla back to Cover to Cover for a free, online storytime. Register today for a chance to win a signed copy of her new book.
Lindsay will read her lovely new picture book I LOVE YOU WITH ALL OF MY HEARTS (ages 3 and up). Animals come in many shapes and sizes—some have large ears, others have distinctive noses, and still others have far too many eyes! They express emotions in different ways, too, but one thing remains the same: love.
When you read a picture book to a small child, that child hears your voice speaking the words that the author has written. This is a tautology, you might think: “Well, of course if I am reading aloud, it is my voice that the child is hearing.” Yet beneath this statement of the obvious there’s something wonderful. For when you read a picture book in which the author (or a character) expresses affection and tenderness, then the child hears not merely the loving words in the book, which is nice enough, but also those loving words spoken by you. For this reason, picture books about love have the happy effect of dispensing it. This is what author Lindsay Bonilla and illustrator Eleonora Pace make possible with “I Love You With All of My Hearts” (Creative Editions, 32 pages, $18.99), a picture book for children ages 2-6 that enlists tapirs, chameleons, centipedes and other creatures from the natural world in the service of parental affection. “I love you with all of my ears,” we read, as a fennec fox cuddles up with an elephant. A few pages on, we see an adult and infant gorilla: “I love you with all of my chest.” The book gets its title from the final scene, in which a fully grown octopus dandles a wide-eyed baby above the shell-strewn seabed (see below): “I love you, my child, completely! I love you with all of my hearts. All of me loves all of you—every single part!” The book’s addendum explains more about each animal: that the huge ears of the fennec fox can be half the length of its body; that adult male gorillas thump their chests to warn away younger ones; that octopuses have indeed not one heart but three.
–Wall Street Journal, August 2021
MORE ABOUT LINDSAY
Lindsay is the author of the picture book, POLAR BEAR ISLAND, winner of a 2018 Parents’ Choice Silver Award. I LOVE YOU WITH ALL OF MY HEARTS (Creative Editions, 2021) was released August 10, 2021, and THE STORYTELLER is currently in production (Nancy Paulsen/Penguin, 2022). Learn more about Lindsay at lindsaybonilla.com.
