Love You Forever

P.J. Hammel is a professor of Education at the University of
Saskatchewan.

This is a most refreshing story of love — the kind of love children need to grow happily and securely through life’s many stages. Simply, itis the story of a mother who sings repeatedly to her son the comforting refrain, “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.” So she sings as he develops and passes through the stages of the two-year old, the nine-year old, and the teen, into adulthood. Soon he is singing the song not only to his dying mother, but also to his newborn daughter.

Robert Munsch, author of The Paperbag Princess, Mortimer, Thomas’s Snowsuit, and 50 Below Zero, here has tackled a powerful subject and succeeded by using two simple devices — repetition, a successful device in so many classic children’s stories, and easy to identify with characterization. For example, there is the nine-year old whose mother sometimes “wanted to sell him to the zoo!” and then there is the teenager who sometimes made his mother feel “like she was in the zoo!” McGraw’s full-page illustrations are realistic depictions of the story and make it even more effective.