The Chronic Consumer

I’d heard a lot of good things about the children’s book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch, so I decided to buy it for my boy’s collection. I purchased it online from Amazon.com, where it currently has a 4-star average rating out of more than 700 customer reviews. I read a couple of the reviews, both positive and negative before buying, but didn’t really do too much other research.

The book tells the story of a mother’s unconditional love for her son as he goes through various stages of growth and development: troublesome toddler, sullen teenager, etc. The mother is shown to sneak into the son’s room at night and rock him back and forth as he sleeps. She continues to do this even when her son is a full-grown adult. Then, as the mother ages and gets too old to rock her son, the roles switch and the son rocks the mother.

Now this might sound like a sweet story in theory, but as executed in the book it just came off as uber-creepy. This has everything to do with the drawings by Shelia McGraw, which show the mother crawling into her son’s room on all fours to rock him even when he’s a teenager and stuff.

Look, I tried not to be weirded out by the book, and I really did want to like it. But it just seemed so odd to me that a mother — any mother — would climb a ladder to enter her adult son’s bedroom and rock him in the middle of the night.

I ended up not reading this to my son, and will give it away to the local library the next time they collect books for their annual book fair. I’ve got nothing against people who like Love You Forever; it’s just not something that works for me.