Time of Wonder

 Some children's books are just beautiful, like this one.  Robert McCloskey's muted illustrations take us to a northern island in the summer.  His story celebrates nature and the sea, the passing of days like the tide, and the coming of a hurricane.  In a melodic way, McCloskey invites us into the world of children exploring the nature around them and the wonder of it all.

   

Time of Wonder

Robert McCloskey

1957

"Out on the islands that poke their rocky shores above the waters of Penobscot Bay, you can watch the time of the world go by, from minute to minute, hour to hour, from day to day, season to season."

"Back from the shore the trees look like ghosts.  The forest is so quiet that you can hear an insect boring a tunnel deep inside a log.  And that other sound- not the beating of your heart, but the one like half a whisper- is the sound of growing ferns, pushing aside dead leaves, unrolling their fiddle-heads, slowly unfurling, slowly stretching."

Rotten Island

Rotten Island

William Steig 1984

 Bursting with color and comedy and tragedy, Steig's story seems alive on the pages.  He depicts an island filled with absolute rottenness- from the terrible monsters on the land and air and sea, to the horrific weather with "an earthquake an hour, black tornadoes, lightning sprees with racking thunder, squalls, cyclones, and dust storms.  At night it froze; all the living things stopped moving and turned to ice."  The island is covered with volcanoes and hot lava and sharp gravel.  Each page is comically worse and worse and the pictures are fantastic!  One day, a small thing of beauty occurs and changes the island forever.  The story almost feels too allegorical to be a children's book, but children will definitely delight in the over-the-top depictions of the horrible island life.