LOVE IS FOR ROARING

A genuine conversation about love and expressing it.

In a diverse animal classroom—worm to giraffe, kangaroo to ladybug—an assignment is posted on the whiteboard: “Show your Love.” Lion, looking vulnerable rather than angry, “roar[s]”: “For whom? For what? And WHY?!” The task seems “impossible…undoable…unimaginable.” Luckily, Lion’s friend Mouse understands that glittery craft supplies and pink paper hearts aren’t Lion’s cup of tea. Patiently, he talks Lion through the process of identifying what he doesn’t love (hugs, kisses, dessert—he prefers broccoli!) and what he does: badminton with a pine cone as shuttlecock; growling, roaring, running, chasing, and catching; and his friendship with Mouse. Liwska’s art blankets everything with her trademark softness, which serves to mute words like roar and growling and Lion’s description as “fearsome.” From gentle browns and warm grays to the animals’ downy fur and cottony edges, nothing is aesthetically threatening. This artistic softness, in turn, leaves room for visual content with edge: the subtlest reference to Lion’s natural role as a predator of, perhaps, mice; a school lesson featuring a (textually unremarked) film about pollution, smokestacks, and soot; a single illustration, clearly a memory, in which Lion wears a mask and holds a stiff tape measure between himself and Mouse, nodding oh so quietly to the pandemic, presumably in this book’s past. (Mouse’s mask hangs off his ear because he’s eating.)

A comforting support of the right to make love-related decisions; softness in a slightly sad world.