Valentine's Day books focus on selfless acts of love

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 is portrayed in several new children's books released in time for Valentine's Day.

"The Love-Me Bird" (Orchard Books, 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.

Cornelia is outside on a rainy day in "The Day it Rained Hearts" (HarperCollins, 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, ages 3-6) and "Love & Kisses, Bunny" (Little Simon, 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!"

"She Loves Me ... She Loves Me Not ..." (HarperCollins, 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 pluck petals off daisies playing the "he loves me, he loves me not" game as two vexed cherubs agonize over the proceedings. If that humor is too sophisticated for your little one, try "Bee Mine" (Little Simon, ages 4-8), a Valentine's Day pop-up book by Olive Ewe and illustrated by Daniel Moreton. Children will get a giggle out of the valentines rhymes.