professor filthbottom's ugly book review

I don't know if you've noticed, but there have been a lot of ugly picture books released throughout the long and storied history of children's bookdom. A lot of beautiful ones, sure, but a lot of unintentionally (or intentionally), disturbingly illustrated ones, too (see "What's Drunk, Mama?"). And some of these books have gone on to become bestsellers. I'm thinking of one, in particular, which I call Abomination from Beyond the Stars. You may know it as Love You Forever. If you haven't encountered this book, and apparently a lot of you have (it's currently number 1,370 in the Amazon.com sales rankings, and it was first published in 1986), you should make a point of seeking it out, if only to see what a very eerie, literal interpretation of a mother's eternal love for her child looks like. But I'll save you some time: it looks weird. There may be a better way to illustrate the book's central theme than to depict an old woman climbing a ladder into her forty year old son's bedroom to cradle him in the middle of the night, but I'm pretty sure no one could come up with a more terrifying way, short of giving the old woman clown makeup and fangs. Anyway, you can pick it up at your local Target (it's the one with a bathroom-wrecking gnome on the cover) along with The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and...well, that's it, really. Maybe some Dora the Explorer crap. I don't know.