watch that Wave

In honor of our week at the beach, I have some beachy books to share with you. The first book is one I happened to fall in love with at the bookstore one day. I'm easily drawn into children's books with interesting cover art and this book definitely stood out amongst the shelves of cartoonish counterparts.

Wave is the story of a little girl encountering a large wave on the beach. The story is one so familiar to most of us that it quickly makes us reminisce about the point in our lives when the waves were enticing, menacing, and delightful all rolled into one large crashing tunnel of salty sea water.

Wave is told through charcoal and blue-turquoise acrylics but no text which puts it in a minority of children's picture books. A story this familiar needs no words however, and beautiful colors and lines of the illustration really tell the story in it's marvelous simplicity. The little girl's thoughts and emotions come through her varied expressions and our own experiences in her place.

I really enjoy asking younger children to tell me the story using books like this. You can learn a lot about what they think of their own beach wave experience through their storytelling of this book. A particularly handy thing when you're at the beach!