NEW YORK — For many children, Valentine's Day means one thing: candy. The only difference between Valentine's Day and Halloween, it seems, is the color of the sweet stuff. For children who are old enough to cut out paper hearts or send cards, the holiday can be a stressful time, since the size of a child's stack of pink and red valentines can be seen as a barometer of popularity.
Beyond candy and competition, though, the holiday is a celebration of love, and not just the kind adults express with flowers and poetry and candlelit dinners. Love and affection for everyone — family, friends, neighbors and animals — is portrayed in several new children's books released in time for Valentine's Day.
"The Love-Me Bird" (Orchard Books, $15.95, ages 3-8) by Joyce Dunbar tells the story of a bird who's desperate for love, trying various approaches like dressing up, acting helpless, playing hard to get and building a nest, all while singing, "Love me! Love me! Love me!"
But the Love-Me Bird's self-serving pleas are never answered; only when she changes her tune to "Love you! Love you! Love you!" does she find her true love. Sophie Fatus' red, pink and white rendering of the Love-Me Bird, and her use of bright spring colors throughout the book, add a visual sugarcoating to the bittersweet tale about rejection and, eventually, acceptance.
In another tale of giving, a little girl hands out heart-shaped balloons, which are padded and satiny-feeling, in "Give a Little Love" (Little Simon, $9.99, ages 4-8) by Lizzie Mack, illustrated by Julia Gorton. One by one, she gives the balloons away, eliciting a hug and a wink, a kiss, a jolly tune and a yummy surprise, proving her mother's dictum: "When you give something away, you get back more than you can say."
Cornelia is outside on a rainy day in "The Day it Rained Hearts" (HarperCollins, $6.99, ages 4-8) by Felicia Bond. She catches a bundle of the red hearts of all shapes and sizes and brings them inside to use as valentines.
Bond perfectly captures a child deep in thought and hard at work with her drawings of Cornelia lying on the floor holding up the hearts one at a time, leaning onto a table as she ponders another heart and holding her forehead as she decorates another with paint. After agonizing over each choice, Cornelia puts so much love into the homemade valentines for her friends the dog, the mouse, the turtle and the rabbit that the hearts return every year — growing on tree branches instead of falling in a rainstorm.
Giving love and affection to family members is the topic of "Kiss Kiss!" (Simon & Schuster, $12.95, ages 3-6) and "Love & Kisses, Bunny" (Little Simon, $4.99, up to age 4).
In "Kiss Kiss!" by Margaret Wild and Bridget Strevens-Marzo, a baby hippo forgets to kiss his mother in the morning, upsetting the rest of his day. Everywhere he goes, he's reminded of the loving gesture he forgot when he passes mother-child pairings of elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, zebras and monkeys, all saying, "Kiss kiss!"
"Love & Kisses, Bunny," written by Dandi Daley Mackall and illustrated by Hala Wittwer in warm-and-fuzzy pale pastels, is a board book that encourages little ones to touch the bunnies by making them velvety soft with fabric cutouts.
The story revolves around Baby Bunny's question: Why does Mama Bunny love me? After she kisses his forehead, he wonders if she loves him for his head. After she scratches his ears, he examines them in the mirror. "Silly Bunny, Mama Bunny loves you 'cause you're you!" she finally tells him. For a more humorous take on love, the rerelease of a 1963 book by Robert Keeshan and illustrated by "Where the Wild Things Are" author Maurice Sendak focuses on the role that fate, and misunderstandings, play in the game of love.
"She Loves Me . . . She Loves Me Not . . . " (HarperCollins, $12.95, ages 4-8) is a simple, fanciful tale about a couple whose affections seem to ebb and flow in opposition to each other. The boy and girl — dressed in a top hat and a red cape, respectively — pluck petals off daisies playing the "he loves me, he loves me not" game as two vexed cherubs agonize over the proceedings. Everyone, including the cherubs, ends up happy. "Bee Mine" (Little Simon, $12.95, ages 4-8), a Valentine's Day pop-up book by Olive Ewe is illustrated by Daniel Moreton. Children will get a giggle out of the pun-crazy book, which has three-dimensional valentines like the one from Rex the dog: "Fleas be my Valentine!" It also offers loving odes from Pinky the elephant ("From my tail to my trunk, I'm nuts about you!") and from Larry Lamb ("Wool you be mine?"), who ends his note with "I love ewe."