IF KISSES WERE COLORS

Jay’s brilliant imagination and artistry make this rather pedestrian, baby love song shine. The text is a simple and just-short-of-saccharine rhyme of parent-to-baby kisses: “If kisses were acorns, a forest would grow / of beautiful oak trees, in row after row. . . . If kisses were blankets, / you’d always be warm, / wrapped up from the cold / during winter’s worst storm.” It’s all very sweet and affectionate. Jay’s pictures, however, partake of the wonderful inspiration that made her art for Picture This (2000) and A World of Wonders (p. 48) so remarkable. She uses alkyd oil paint on paper with a crackling varnish; the result seems to capture sunlit colors behind a slightly crazed glass surface. Her pictures inhabit a dreamlike landscape where a baby sits in a sunflower-decorated carriage nearly as tall as a tree, and animals in exuberant dress (the bunny is wearing polka dots, the elephant a striped bathing suit) dance beneath a rainbow. The sun wears a smile, and the acorn, facing a page of oaks, is a winsome and solid presence with a face like a grandfather clock. A distant and not as wittily composed cousin to Baby Hearts and Baby Flowers (2001), but the pictures repay reading and rereading. (Picture book. 3-6)