Good Books
Karen Schacter, contributing editor (www.dishingwithyourdaughters.com
Book Review: I LOVE YOU MORE
Book by Laura Duksta
Illustrated by Karen Keesler
“I Love You More” is a “flip book,” which means that it begins from both sides and each side reads through to the middle. As Laura says, “just like love, this book never ends.”
If you open it on one side, you will “hear” a little boy asking his mother, “Mommy, just how much do you love me?” And you will hear the mother answering, in flowing rhyming language, “I love you higher than the highest bird ever flew, I love you taller than the tallest tree ever flew,” and so on, until the middle of the book, which reads, “Then she wrapped her arms around him with all the love that she had, and he felt it all surround him, when he whispered, ‘you know what, mommy? I love you more. I love you more than anything in the whole wide world.’”
Flip the book over to the other side, and you hear the boy telling his mother, in playful, childlike, rhyming language how much he loves her (“I love you quieter than the quietest caterpillar ever creeped, I love you further than the furthest frog ever leapt”) and ending again, in the middle of the book, with a profession of love, just as the other side did.
Laura Duksta shares that she wrote this book as an answer to a prayer, a prayer for her sister who was struggling at the time. However, what is clear to me and I hope will be for you too, is that this book may be an answer to a universal prayer: A prayer that the power of love between mother and child is life-giving and sustaining, not just for that child, but for all of us. By taking this deep love and passing it on, we may be creating a more peaceful, loving world, one child at a time.
