Essex Books Presents Shelf Awareness: Valentine's Day Edition

Essex Books Presents Shelf Awareness has rounded up three of their favorite Valentine's Day picture books.

Before you, says the narrator, "I was a flower with no pot./ I was a polka with no dot." "I was a tail without a wag./ Just a bean without a bag." Rebecca Doughty's Before You (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) captures the forlorn nature of each "before you" scenario with just the right amount of sadsack droopiness. "I was a bowl without a fish" is illustrated, suspiciously, with an empty fish bowl and a cat pawing the side of the glass. When the much-anticipated "you" does arrive, the tune changes: "You put the fizz into the pop./ You put the flip into the flop." A fizzy adult-to-adult valentine.

In Adam Rex and illustrator Scott Campbell's XO, OX: A Love Story (Neal Porter/Roaring Brook Press), Ox is utterly enamored with the starlet Gazelle and finally writes to tell her so: "Even when you are running from tigers you are like a ballerina who is running from tigers. I think that what I am trying to say is that I love you." Gazelle responds with a form letter. Ox persists, finally getting under her skin by lovingly implying that she might have a fault or two. Is her main fault that she "could never, ever love an ox?" Or could she be persuaded? (She can.)

Mick Inkpen (the Kipper series) packs a surprising emotional punch with I Will Love You Anyway (Aladdin), a rhyming British import about unconditional love, expressively illustrated by his daughter Chloë Inkpen. A bulging-eyed pug is trouble, silently telling his beloved redheaded boy: "I steal your glove./ I steal your shoe./ I steal your socks./ They smell of you." He runs away, but the family retrieves him: "I don't do 'Sit!'/ I don't do 'Stay!'/ But I will love you anyway." Drop everything and find this wonderful book right now.

Written by Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness