Valentine’s Day: Self-Love Edition
February 8, 2024 § Leave a comment
In my opinion, Valentine’s Day greatly improved as a holiday when I started thinking of it as a chance to gift myself and my loves ones a new book (or three). Any great book will do, of course, but I do love something that approaches the idea of love in a clever, non-traditional way. Past favorites have included Viking in Love, All the Beating Hearts, and Brimsby’s Hats. (If you’re following me on Instagram, you’ll be getting a new recommendation every day between now and the 14th). But I think today’s picture book takes the (heart-shaped) cake for Most Unlikely Book to Gift for Valentine’s Day.
Pepper & Me is a story about a scab. You heard me. Well, more accurately, it’s a story about a girl who gets a scab from falling down—and then goes on to name that scab, talk to that scab, and befriend that scab. Is that weird? Yup, it’s super-duper weird. Does it also feel authentic, like could I picture my own children doing something like this when they were younger? Absolutely. (I mean, my son did warm to a restaurant straw wrapper that he kept on his bedside table for months.) Is it all kinds of delightful because the story is written and illustrated by the magnificent Italian storyteller, Beatrice Alemagna, the talent behind one of my forever favorites, On a Magical Do-Nothing Day? You better believe it.
All those points aside, what could Pepper & Me possibly have to do with Valentine’s Day? Well, here’s the thing. Initially, our protagonist is repulsed by this scab on her knee. “Hideous scab,” she calls it. She feels marred by its presence and fearful of its persistence. And yet, as the days go on, she turns her curiosity on the bloody aberration and, in doing so, begins to accept, even embrace, it as part of herself. Ultimately, what makes this story one of love is the way it showcases the girl’s emotional journey from resistance to re-framing. It may be the quirkiest expression of self-love to grace the pages of a picture book, but it’s a marvelous way to introduce the idea of what might happen if we learn to love all our parts, even the ugly ones.
Right out of the gate, Alemagna nails the first-person voice of the young narrator, and the unfiltered, matter-of-fact delivery will immediately endear young listeners. “Yesterday I fell. I tripped on a cobblestone and—oof! Face down, belly on the ground. When I stood up, my knee was scraped. It burned a lot, lot, lot! I cried like a baby. It was like a scary movie with you-know-what dripping down my leg. I had never seen so much blood before. Blood. I said the word that really scares us kids.”
The girl is bandaged up by her father, whose flaming orange hair matches her own, and who informs her that she’ll soon develop “a beautiful scab.” The girl confesses to us, “I got a scab, but it wasn’t beautiful. […] It looked like a big hamburger. Except I couldn’t eat it.”
What follows is a lot of waiting for the scab to fall off. And the more the girl has to wait, the more frustrated she feels, not just by the way the scab looks and feels, but by the way it marks her as different. Sure, she knows lots of human beings have scabs, “but mine was the worst one in the whole world.” (That touch of hyperbole laced with narcissism? Again, pitch perfect.)
As the scab persists, and the girl spends more time studying it, something shifts. Like you’d eventually name a stray dog that follows you everywhere, the girl gives the scab a name: Pepper. She gives it a pronoun: she. She then goes so far as to give Pepper a voice—and, by doing so, a personality.
“You want me to go away, don’t you?” said Pepper.
“Yes, please.”
“Sorry, but you have to wait. By the way, what kind of a silly name did you give me? You couldn’t have called me Crystal or Jazzy? A super nice cute name?”
As the girl becomes more acquainted with Pepper, she also becomes more attuned to her own body. She begins, for example, to notice the way Pepper pulls at the her skin as she walks, a sensation familiar to anyone who has ever had a scab, especially around a joint. Eventually, the girl begins to look upon Pepper as something less than loathsome. “Sometimes it seemed like she was smiling at me.”
Eventually, too, the girl begins to treat Pepper as something of a confidante, a place to direct musings about the past and future. She confesses to a fear of spiders. She discusses a dream to go to Japan…and to get a dog. With Pepper to talk to, days are suddenly less lonely.
To be a child is to be faced with as many goodbyes as hellos, and the thing about scabs is that, in time, they shrink and fall off. When, one morning, the girl sits up in bed and discovers Pepper is gone, her first reaction of one of betrayal: “She told me she wouldn’t leave, but then she did! And she didn’t even say a word.” When she later finds Pepper in her bedsheets, she regards her carefully, as one would regard a treasure, before deciding to hold a kind of mini-funeral.
Beatrice Alemagna’s waxy, smudgy, 70s-vibey palette plays up oranges and greens and browns and will be familiar to those who know her other books. But her use of color is itself a powerful storytelling device. Until now, the girl’s neon hair has been the biggest pop of color on every page. When the girl bids farewell to Pepper in a field of flowers, it’s as if the maturity and love of that moment radiates out into the expanse of fiery poppies. It’s as much a visual climax as it is an emotional one: the pulsating heart of one girl’s journey towards self-love.
Pepper may be gone—what takes her place in the girl’s life is a surprise I won’t spoil—but the girl notices that the skin she leaves behind is slightly discolored. And that’s OK. Because part of learning to love ourselves is learning to love the different versions of ourselves, including what we’ve lost as much as what we’ve gained.
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Book published by Hippo Park, an imprint of Astra Books. All opinions are my own. Links support the beautiful Old Town Books, where I am the children’s buyer (and yes, we ship!).
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