Tuesday Storytime: Valentines Friends

So many good books about friendships and valentines!  Too hard to narrow down to just three, so I like doing multiple storytimes - there will be more love going around next week!

Friendshape

Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld (Exclamation Mark)

ISBN: 9780545436823

The duo behind the visually punny Exclamation Mark returns with a set of four shapes who are excellent friends.  Previously reviewed here.

The four friends (a red rectangle, green equilateral triangle, yellow square, and light blue circle) extol the virtues of friendship in a series of visual puns and clever wordplay.  For example, "Friends welcome others to join in" has the blue circle exclaiming "so glad you could stop by!" to a red octagon (get it?) while "Friends play fair and ..." has the yellow square friend at the end of those ellipses, so kids can learn the phrase "fair and square" on their own.  So cute.  I don't know how much the littles got out of it, but the parents had a blast.

The Day it Rained Hearts

Felicia Bond (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie) 

ISBN: 0066238765 

It rained hearts, so our heroine collects them to decorate and send as valentines to her friends.

This is a great story, because other than the fanciful premise of it raining hearts, the whole premise is about using resources and creating things especially for friends - to make something that would appeal to a friend specifically, not to make generic or mass-market offerings.  The prosaic matter-of-fact storytelling puts the emphasis on creation and consideration of individual quirks and interests, and the illustrations hit them again, even when the text moves on.  Very sweet, very straightforward, and good for a bit before Valentines Day, because of the focus on creating and sending the hearts. 

No Two Alike

Keith Baker (LMNO Peas, Big Fat Hen)

ISBN: 9781442417427

More lyrical and mellow than his previous books, but lush and beautiful; both visually and to read.

Keith Baker is a fantastic artist, and I've enjoyed his concepts.  His illustrations for Big Fat Hen are utterly scrumptious (I've used both it and LMNO Peas in storytimes before) so it's nice to have another by him, and I'm enjoying this meditation on friendship and individual differences very much.  It's a bit of a conceptual leap for littles, but it's still beautiful, and the story flows nicely at the end of the storytime (it is VERY mellow, and very downbeat).  We follow two red birds through a winterscape as they explore the idea that nothing: no two nests, no two snowflakes, no two roads or bridges or fawns or even the little red birds themselves, are exactly alike, and that's precisely how it should be.  Sweet with just a tinge of melancholy.