I Miss You Every Day
In rhyming lines, a young girl tells a faraway loved one about her loneliness, and also her solution: "I'm going to wrap myself just like a present . . . and send myself your way." Minimal words and whimsical, bright, textured illustrations follow the girl as she wraps herself in brown paper, jumps into a box (with holes for her sneakered feet), and walks to the post office, where she imagines being stamped, processed, and sent by plane and truck to the address of her loved one (who is never identified). Her final instructions: "Tuck me in and read a story and everything will be O.K." The book's title is also the text's refrain, and the words' repetition, along with each page's clear focus on the yearning girl, reinforce the story's potent sense of separation from a favorite person. The loved one's open-ended identity leaves lots of room for kids to imagine their own scenarios. Both upbeat and poignant, this partners well with Libby Gleeson's Half a World Away (2007). Engberg, Gillian