By Susan Verde
First-person affirmations about love — being gentle with yourself, kind to other people, grateful for the world — from the I Am series, closing with a loving-kindness meditation you can read aloud together.
It's the fourth of Susan Verde and Peter H. Reynolds's 'I Am' books, after Yoga, Peace, and Human, and like the others it's less a story than a string of affirmations a child speaks through the day, starting from 'I am love.' The narrator moves through the shapes love can take: being gentle with yourself on a hard morning, reaching out to someone who's sitting alone, stopping to feel grateful for the world, choosing kindness first. Reynolds's loose watercolors give every page room to breathe. At the very back there's a guided loving-kindness meditation, a few plain lines — may I be happy, may you be happy — that you can read aloud together, so the book hands your child an actual way to practice the compassion it's been describing.
This one suits the tender-hearted child, the one who feels things deeply and could use both comfort and a way to hand it back. What makes it more than a warm read is that it treats love as something you do, not only something you feel: on a hard day it says be gentle with yourself, and toward a lonely classmate it says reach out. Verde's calm lines and Reynolds's soft art make the pages feel like being held. The meditation at the end turns all of it into a small practice a family can keep going.