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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607001936346 | Picture Books | COOPER | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
Award-winning author Elisha Cooper uses his renowned soft yet lively watercolors to celebrate the cherished act of visiting the beach. "Away to the beach! Away to sand and salt water, to rolling dunes and pounding waves." A day at the beach supplies any child with a lifetime of memories. In this new picture book by award-winning author Elisha Cooper, the simple magic of building sand castles, collecting seashells, and running from the waves is brought to life through poetic text and lively illustrations. Together, readers will be able to visit the beach year-round as they share this delightful book.
Author Notes
Elisha Cooper is the award-winning author of Train , which received five starred reviews; Farm , which received starred reviews in Horn Book Magazine and Publishers Weekly ; and Beach , which won the 2006 Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. Other picture books include A Good Night Walk , Magic Thinks Big , and Dance! , a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year. Elisha Cooper lives with his family in New York City. For more information, go to elishacooper.com.
Reviews (2)
School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 3-"As the day begins, the beach is empty, waiting to be filled." Cooper opens with a gorgeous stretch of sand in sun-flecked, amber-white watercolors, bounded by a sea so darkly blue that it seems still half-asleep. In the following pages, he tells the story, mainly in detailed splashes of paint, of the people and things that transform the quiet area into a lively spot. Readers will enjoy the affectionate portraits of swimmers, kite-flyers, sunbathers, seagulls, and barking dogs. A struggle with an inner tube or a beach umbrella, the people who go into the water but forget that they are still wearing their glasses, the clouds that look like spilled popcorn: here, as in life, it's the little things that snag readers' attention. Cooper's portrayal of a day at the shore is generous with such minutiae; his fondness for his subject is evident and infectious. As the beach once again empties at the end of the story, it's tempting to return to the first page, to a hundred possible activities at the shore-none of which is more earthshaking than a toppled sandcastle.-Susan Weitz, formerly at Spencer-Van Etten School District, Spencer, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Like Cooper's other picture books (Baseball; Building), this surfside exploration combines a prosaic text with loose, cartoon-like figures that detail the activities a careful observer can notice about a particular place. "Away to the beach! Away to sand and salt water, to rolling dunes and pounding waves," begins the straightforward narrative. Three vertical panels depict an empty stretch of beach, which gradually fills with people. Like the labeled illustrations in Richard Scarry's word books, several pages feature a plethora of tiny watercolor-and-pencil sketchbook drawings with one-sentence captions: "A woman changes into her swimsuit under her towel.... Two sisters fill buckets with sand and start building a sculpture.... Seagulls watch everything, hovering until made to move." Another spread brims with intriguing images of cloud shapes. The small, faceless figures resemble sophisticated drawings of an artist's wooden model positioned in various poses, as the scenes progress from early morning until dusk. But the text reads like commentary on an artist's notebook, with neither a conflict nor a plot to keep young readers involved. It may be more suitable as a meditation for older beachgoers. Ages 3-5. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved