Dacia's Reviews > Love You Forever

This is the only children's book I've ever read that stuck me as more depressing than "The Giving Tree". My mother gave me a copy just before my son was born. I read it once and promptly lost to book. I don't think I could EVER read it to my son. It's so.... well.. sorta twisted. Yes it's about love, but it seems so unrealistic, and morbid. I know one day my son will grow up and leave, and I'll get old and die, but I'd rather not dwell on the subject.

As a child I found books on this subject very distressing. I didn't want to THINK about leaving my parents and my home. It upset me because then I wasn't ready. When the time to move out actually came (and I hit it young, at 15), I experienced a couple of weeks of intense home sickness, and the promptly go over it. The actual leaving wasn't nearly as bad as the horrible imaginings I'd had as a small child. To me, books like this make kids focus on the losses of the future, instead of the gains.

Yes, the mother is saying "she'll love him forever", but what child with reasonably attentive parents doesn't already know that? The fact that the book shows it as something of a anomoly makes the child (or at least ME as a child) think there is something REAL to fear in seperation. Anyway, I know this is a long diatribe about a very short, silly, cute, cuddly children's book, but...

That's how powrefully upset the book made me.