SuitabookLove Is a Good Thing to Feel
Barbara M. Joosse
- Reading
- Look closely at the illustrations and read aloud at an unhurried pace. Invite the child to respond to one feeling at a time, and treat the heart facts as optional prompts rather than the main lesson.
- Themes
- Love expressed in different ways: Harriet identifies hugs, drawings and spoken words as ways of saying that she loves someone. The book clearly presents several forms of expressing affection as meaningful and available to Harriet.
- Love alongside difficult feelings: The book links love with feeling angry after time-out, sadness when someone is missing, jealousy around a friend’s birthday and worry about a treasured stuffed animal. It appears to explain that affection and difficult emotions can coexist, without treating those feelings as proof that love has ended.
- Child-centred ideas about the heart: The book includes comments about hearts, including a contrast between the heart’s real shape and a valentine shape, plus claims about worms and sponges. These passages seem to add factual and humorous material to the emotional theme, but their accuracy and purpose are not fully clear.
- Worth knowing
- Some families may want to pause over the book’s unusual comparisons, heart information and occasionally forced-sounding rhyme. The emotional range is broad, but the treatment may feel more associative than smoothly structured.