✍ Scribed by Nikki McClure
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
For one young boy, it’s a perfect summer day to spend at the beach with his family. He scours the high tide line for treasures, listens to the swizzling sound of barnacles, and practices walking the plank. But mostly he waits for high tide. Then he’ll be able to swim and dive off the log raft his family is building. While he waits, sea birds and other creatures mirror the family’s behaviors: building and hunting, wading and eating. At long last the tide arrives, and human and animal alike savor the water.
Another beautiful ode to life lived in harmony with nature, and by the labor of one’s own hands, from an artist of great warmth and clarity.
**
K-Gr 4-"I can see everything on this beach…." The child protagonist of McClure's marvelous picture book shows readers exactly how much there is to see while waiting for the tide to come in. From the soaring seagull to a broken pair of sunglasses to "all the life in the mud too small to see or fathom," the child chronicles the treasures to be found by those who are willing to look. The work of this particular turn of tide is to lash together logs, poles, and planks to make a raft. Mother, father, and grandmother work alongside the hatchet-wielding child and then leap again and again into the water, a reward for a long, patient day of work and observation. McClure's cut-paper images are at once sweeping in their scale and extraordinary in their detail. In one wordless spread, the family rests and eats lunch, a seaplane takes off, gulls swoop down on clams, and a heron stands in the shallow water, waiting for its lunch. A page turn brings viewers underwater to a close-up on the heron's single leg, surrounded by barnacles, plankton, crabs, and fish. This book shares more in length and complexity of text with To Market to Market (Abrams, 2011) than McClure's more recent books for younger audiences. It would make a wonderful West Coast companion to Robert McCloskey's One Morning in Maine. VERDICT A splendid seaside tour worth poring over. For general picture book collections as well as curriculum units on natural science.-Jennifer Costa, Cambridge Public Library, MAα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
STARRED REVIEW
“Lavish with words and images in a story that is a worthy heir to Robert McCloskey’s work… The sense of place is so rich that it seems possible to smell the air and hear the gulls.”
(Publisher's Weekly)
STARRED REVIEW
"Astounding full-bleed, cut-paper illustrations (in black and white with isolated use of pink and blue) appear opposite the narrative—muted, matte, and miraculous. Clumped kelp, rippling water, clambering crabs, banks of barnacles, round cheeks, the curvature, of feathers and barbed beaks, bark on logs—all achieve extraordinary, evocative clarity through lacy cutouts within the context of gratifying, gorgeous compositions. The tide has brought an extraordinary book to our shores."
(Kirkus)
"… McClure’s cut-paper images are at once sweeping in their scale and extraordinary in their detail... A splendid seaside tour worth poring over. For general picture book collections as well as curriculum units on natural science."
(School Library Journal)
STARRED REVIEW
"McClure’s distinctive artwork—black paper cut with an X-ACTO knife and fountain pen—has never been richer. The simple palette of black, white, and blue, accented with the occasional pink (the sunglasses, the heron’s long legs, the gulls’ feet), is stunning. Children will love searching for the marine animals and detritus. Delicately penned endpapers illustrate the steps in raft-building, and some shore creatures. A celebration of the natural beauty of a summer’s day on the Olympic Coast."
(Booklist)
"Stunning paper-cut and fountain ink illustrations bring readers to the Salish Sea for a day of raft building and waiting for high tide."
(School Library Connection)
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