Tanya Woodson’s debut picture book opens with a grandmother who has never met her grandchild — and has loved that child for years regardless.. I Dreamed of You, released by the Los Angeles-based author, follows a woman across the key chapters of her life: marriage, raising children, watching years pass. Through all of it, a quiet certainty grows. Someone is coming. She already loves them.
The story builds toward a first meeting, but the emotional weight sits earlier than that. Woodson traces the particular feeling that grandparents rarely get to name — the anticipatory love that forms in the years before a grandchild exists, the sense that a family still has a space waiting to be filled. By the time the grandmother and grandchild meet on the page, the reunion carries the accumulated warmth of everything that preceded it.
That premise gives the book a wider reach than a standard grandparent-grandchild story. Grandparents reading it aloud will find their own unspoken feelings reflected back. Expectant parents will encounter a version of their growing family seen through different eyes. Children listening will absorb something they may not fully understand until later — that they were anticipated, hoped for, and held in someone’s heart long before they arrived.
Woodson writes in a rhythmic, accessible style that suits both the adult reader and the young listener. Her sentences move with the patience the story requires — unhurried, warm, uncluttered. She describes emotions rather than events, which leaves space for the reader’s own experience to enter the narrative. The effect is closer to a conversation than a recitation.
For a picture book, the emotional register is notably adult. I Dreamed of You addresses the long arcs of family life — the waiting, the hoping, the way love expands rather than divides when new people enter it. Those themes make it an unusual gift book: practical enough for a baby shower, personal enough for a grandmother to keep.
I Dreamed of You is Woodson’s debut. It is available on Amazon and at major retailers nationwide.
