A WORLD OF LOVE

Reid and Lyles create a colorful world of parent-child love.

Each page turn reveals a different animal and environment, each done in a striking palette, including spring green, ocean blue, and desert brown. Stunning collages made with hand-painted paper, pencil, and crayon range from simpler cutouts of sheep grazing on a hilly pasture and a light-skinned human parent at the beach as the sun sets, to a mourning dove and her baby in an intricately constructed nest. Two stanzas of easy-to-read rhyming verse accompany each family scene. Each spread starts with the refrain “If all the earth.” Reid then mentions a hypothetical situation and concludes with a specific way the parent would care for and protect the child (“If all the earth / were ice and snow / and you were small and new, / I’d shelter you, my chick, my chick— / secure until you grew”). Many verses also include the specific term for the baby animal, such as a sheep’s lamb, a dolphin’s calf, a goat’s kid, and a penguin’s chick. Though Reid includes two stanzas of verse for each animal, at the end, she uses four stanzas for the human parent and child. Richly colored, detailed illustrations and short verses brimming with love make this book a good candidate for one-on-one reading (and snuggling). Backmatter offers additional information about each animal’s devoted parenting behavior and in two cases (emperor penguins and gorillas) describes the role of fathers.

Tailor-made for a naptime cuddle.