In My Heart: A Book of Feelings (Growing Hearts)

Concentric heart-shaped die-cuts are the centerpiece of this elegantly designed book about emotions, first published in France. An expressive pencil-drawn child uses relatable similes and metaphors to describe her various feelings: "Some days my heart feels as heavy as an elephant. There's a dark cloud over my head, and tears fall like rain. This is when my heart is sad." A featureless gray-blue elephant sprays water on the girl from its trunk, which swoops toward her from across the spread. Elsewhere, a red cross symbolizes a broken heart in need for healing (dressed as a nurse, the girl wraps the cross with a bandage), and the girl appears as Red Riding Hood, pursued by a wolf, to demonstrate fear. Witek covers an impressive emotional range while Roussey's childlike drawings evoke each feeling with playful style. Ages 2-4. (Jan.)

PreS-Gr 1--Although this picture book exploration of feelings takes a similar list-and-describe approach to that of Jamie Lee Curtis's Today I Feel Silly: And Other Moods That Make My Day (HarperCollins, 2007) and Dr. Seuss's My Many-Colored Days (Knopf, 1998), don't count that against it. The approach still works, especially when the feelings evoked have such child-friendly imagery ("My heart is yelling, hot and loud," the child narrator explains). The book pairs brief verbal explorations of emotions with evocative imagery, popping with bright colors against the effectively used white background. Throughout the representative illustrations--a bright yellow star to represent happiness, an elephant to represent sadness, a silhouette of the Big Bad Wolf to represent fear--a series of heart cutouts, ever decreasing in size, appears on the pages, until the heroine is able to find her feelings everywhere.--Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MD