Fabian {Councillor}'s Reviews > Love You Forever

Obviously enough, I'm in the minority here, but this children's book is weird, creepy, disturbing and will probably give me more nightmares than any Stephen King novel ever did.

"Love You Forever" is, as the title indicates, about a mother who loves her sweet little baby boy forever, until her baby has grown into an adult and she into an old woman. I'm perfectly fine with the message that mothers (respectively parents in general) will always love their children and will (in most cases - sadly enough, there are always exceptions) do everything for them to be comfortable. But Robert Munsch simply overexaggerated while portraying this message, and finally made me see a totally different message in this book: That a mother's love justifies stalking her children and entering into their lives in one of the creepiest and most disturbing ways - by climbing a ladder to her son's bedroom, entering the house and picking her son up to rock him back and forth while he's sleeping.

I'm sorry, but this is so weird, I can't even find it funny anymore. Yes, the book is meant to be understood metaphorically, the book is supposed to be somehow funny and cute and oh-so-sweet (although I only furled my eyebrows in confusion rather than actually laughing). In the beginning, the book was still interesting; everyone can relate to the way children can bring chaos into everything. But then the mother began to enter her son's room at night. Is it okay to go into your two-year-old son's bedroom while he's sleeping with the intention of admiring him and admitting that you will love him forever? Yes, it is. I am totally fine with that. Doing so with a nine-year-old son begins to show signs of creepiness, but it's still acceptable.
It isn't acceptable if your son is thirty and has moved on with his own life. You can't just break into his house to admire him, indifferent from how lonely you might feel. (And yes, I understand that this book is not supposed to be taken seriously, and it's not even realistically possible for an old woman to be able to pick up her full-grown son while he's sleeping, but this book pretends it is, so I will too.) There are thousands of better ways to incorporate a message about a mother's love into a book. I wouldn't even consider this one to be a children's book ... calling it a horror novel would perhaps be more appropriate.

If you want to read a fantastic children's book, then please skip this and read The Velveteen Rabbit instead, which is an absolutely wonderful story. Or if you want to read two more reviews of "Love You Forever" which I really enjoyed and can whole-heartedly recommend reading, then read this Anne's review or the other Anne's.