The title is the message of this sweet, rhyming book that shows families, friends, and neighbors demonstrating their love to each other in many different ways. The people of various ages and racial/ethnic identities lend a hand to each other, extend invitations, and offer comfort when hope seems lost. Plant imagery fills the pages, with some people tending plants, others offering plants as gifts, and some simply enjoying the beauty of the natural world. Readers see that love, like plants, can be nurtured and grown with care and time.
There is love here among neighbors and siblings, parents and children. There is romantic love here, too, with a man and a woman gazing at each other across a table, hearts rising between them. Another page says, “Love lifts hearts and minds … and comes in many different kinds,” as one person who reads as a man and one, with swoopy blue hair, as either a man or nonbinary person, carry plants together and smile at each other in the way that couples do. (Arguably, love between queer people is the same “kind” of love as between any people with romantic feelings towards each other; love is love, as the saying goes. But I think the intent here is that romantic love doesn’t always have to look the same in terms of the gender of the person we love, and that’s a commendable point.)
The title was originally released as a regular hardback picture book and later as a lift-the-flap board book, where flaps with hidden images underneath add to the fun of this joyous and recommended volume.
