Man, does Mac Barnett get kids.
Barnett wrote I Love You Like a Pig, a 2017 picture book, and Greg Pizzoli did the clear, simple, cartoonish illustrations.
There is no story here. Instead, there’s a good rhythm and an ongoing sequence of brief encounters in which a kid (sometimes more than one) meets something else. There’s a single sentence of dialogue (broken into two lines), and sometimes some sound effects.
So, page one is peach colored, with “I love you/like a pig.” in black letters centered on the page. On page 2, a kid is giving anthropomorphized pig a birthday cake. (It’s clearly a pig, but it’s standing on its hind legs, and wearing shoes and a party hat.)
Some of the lines don’t make much sense. (For example, “I’m lucky/like a window.”) There’s no clear reason to the sequencing: why go from monsters to windows?
And yet, this is a pleasing and successful book. It really captures the energy and spirit of little kid, that nearly random joy of encountering a bunch of weird things, one after another, and laughing yourself silly.
