In My Heart

November 10, 2014
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.

December 1, 2014

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

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2014
Vibrant die cuts, whimsical drawings, and a text that explores a wide range of feelings with just the right touches of imagination and wit combine for a most impressive picture-book experience. Readers will be attracted right away to the rainbow hues of the multilayered die-cut hearts that recede inward from the cover. The device entices readers to turn the page and enter into an exploration of emotion. An expressive girl explains: "My heart is like a house, with all these feelings living inside." On the facing page, the shape of a house surrounds the interior die-cut hearts. With each page turn, emotions from happiness to sadness, bravery to fear, anger to calm are displayed. Witek expertly utilizes similes to help young readers grasp the concepts; a bright yellow star represents happiness, but a red cross with a bandage on it is emblematic of a broken heart when feelings have been hurt. When the girl's heart is "silly," she is "like a bouncy bunny." At other times her heart is "as heavy as an elephant" or hopeful, "like a plant reaching toward the sky." As the pages turn, the hearts get smaller and smaller, until the final spread shows a garden with dozens of hearts. Readers are left to answer a question: "How does your heart feel?" Consider this beautifully designed French import a must-have for any storytime or one-on-one sharing regarding the somewhat sticky subject of feelings. (Picture book. 3-8)

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July 1, 2015
In this French import, a young girl explores human moods by describing her feelings ("I bob along gently like a balloon on a string...lazy and slow"), then identifying the emotion ("my heart is calm"). The colors outlining cardstock die-cut hearts vary appropriately with the emotion, but some illustrations are mysterious: why is an elephant spraying the girl on the "sad" page?

(Copyright 2015 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)