Headed to the beach this summer? Perhaps you are blessed enough to live near (or be close enough to travel to) a warm one. Here on the Pacific NW where I live, our water is pretty cold and you have to work up some nerve to dive into it, but every so often we’ll go and prance about in the waves a bit. No matter the season, I have a son (age 5) who has loved sea creatures since the beginning of (his) time and so I’m always on the lookout for picture and storybook on ocean life. Here are three offerings from Candlewick Press for consideration, if you are on the lookout for the same type of books:
I Spy Under the Sea is Edward Gibbs’ second I Spy book. Of course, when I saw this one was sea creature-themed, I knew we’d want to take a peek. This newer title is laid out in the same format as the first: each page gives contains a hole for you to see a portion of the picture on the next page, and a clue to help you guess what animal you shall see next. In the case of this book, you can expect to see things like dolphins, an octopus, squid and a shark. My son is so well-versed in sea creatures (or, perhaps so old now) that he guessed each picture within a split second and therefore my three year old was the one who found this book more entertaining. Cute! Clever. And regardless of how quickly we guessed which animal we were to see next, we still had a good time with it.
Dolphin Baby!, by Nicola Davies is a lovely picture book filled with scientific fact. Although the book is presented in story form, it is filled with information about dolphin life. We meet Dolphin when he is first born and watch him grow from drinking his mother’s milk to hunting food for himself. Mommy even learned some new things from this particular picture book! For example: male dolphins make best friends with one or two other males which they will then know all of their lives. (I love it when a picture book teaches us something new about an animal that we did not know before!) And it’s curious to think about dolphins being such friends with one another.
In the Sea by David Elliott was Bookworm1’s favorite and my least favorite. It is a book of verse which is typically not my favorite. In fact, my children don’t much care for it either – especially when it doesn’t rhyme. Here is an example of a poem from the book:
The Shark
The fin,
the skin,
the brutal grin . . .The terror of the dark within.
I find that to be incredibly unsatisfying, personally. Each page spread typically shows one to two sea creatures with accompanying verses. After we had read all three of these books, I asked Bookworm1 which had been his favorite and why. He told me that In the Sea was his favorite because he enjoyed the illustrations by Holly Meade. The illustrations in this book are bold and beautiful and all in keeping with what you see here on the cover art. The shark is terrifying to behold (thrill!) and the squid is really quite interesting to look at. The text doesn’t do anything for me, but apparently the pictures hold the charm where the youngster was concerned so there you have it!
We are happy to have had the chance to add some variety to our ocean life reading and are thankful to Candlewick Press for having sent a copy of these books our way in exchange for our honest opinion.
Carrie just keeps swimmin’, just keeps swimmin’, swimmin’ swimmin’ in reviews over at Reading to Know.