There’s a two-page spread in My Dear Sea that perfectly encapsulates the imagination of a child and how they see things. It’s just halfway through the book and shows a young girl running on the shore parallel to the sea. There are outcrops of sand dunes that poke out from the sea, towering above her, set against an impossibly ocean that’s a black as a thousand midnights at the bottom; but becomes that gorgeous light azul you only see in the Caribbean or near Lake Ohrid. The disparate chasm between shallow and deep probably doesn’t occur quickly, but kids imagine it to be that deep. My Dear Sea is an illustrated book about a young girl’s conversation with the sea, how she imagines it appear in its depths and the creatures that live there in her mind’s eye.
Why do some illustrated books succeed and others don’t? Does it capture a kid’s imagination? Do the illustrations vary in their perspective, angles and colors? Can adults look at the book’s illustrations and enjoy them as much as children, albeit at a different level? The cover to My Dear Sea responds with a very tacit, “yes” to those questions. It’s a pretty cover, but not the Earth-shattering takeaway that one might expect to the sort of book that you’d put in the timeless classic category.
As you open the book its appeal does take off, it does allude to it, but only through its clever use of perspective. We see a young girl skidding to a stop in the sand, just before a massive series of waves are rumbling up to meet her. Her dad, who is never seen, had just warned her to respect the sea. The girl listens that time, but quickly lies down with her belly on the sand as if she’s catching a ride. As it happens almost every time a kid that age tries to taunt the sea, she gets the short end of the stick and ends up in a dishwasher. Up is down, down is sideways and seemingly every color of the blue rainbow is swirling before her eyes.
When the waves finally let go she crawls back to higher ground on the dunes. The trail of her legs is pulled behind like Daryl Hannah in Splash when she first encounters land and isn’t able to walk. The girl goes back to the sea’s edge to help build a sand castle, hike along some tide pools and peer down from overlooks into deeper parts of water where her imagination can run amuck. It’s in these pages, the latter 75% that the illustrations, their colors, the scope, perspective and story fully embrace the wanderlust and relevancy that children will identify with.
It’s possible for an illustrated book both to speed up, as well as, slow down at the same time. This discrepancy depends on who is reading it, when they’re reading it and if it’s their first time reading My Dear Sea. As the little girl starts walking along the shore she goes through a rock opening that’s been carved out over the millennia. There are dozens of people in the distance in front of her. The next two pages show the girl splashing through some puddles with the rock opening behind her.
As she continues walking her imagination as to what’s in the sea comes roaring to life. She imagines a monstrous sea creature wrapping its body around a massive schooner that would’ve sailed back in the 1600s. There is a rainbow-colored procession of fish of all sizes and depths that make their way to the surface. These fish fill 95% of the page’s space, from corner to corner with their odd shapes and curious attitudes. The girl imagines the blackness of the Midnight Zone, and author/illustrator Andre Carrilho does a magical job of capturing what it looks like to an elementary-aged kid. As My Dear Sea rides into the falling climax, her adventures come back to reality, with her playing with kids in the sand.
It’s the art that will really drive the interest in My Dear Sea. The story stems from a quote that the author’s daughter said as they were leaving the beach one day. The ocean is something that people who live near it take for granted. It’s the simple, yet very profound wonder of a kid addressing the ocean as My Dear Sea that can ground it for our old, bitter souls. This is the edge of land that leads out to an unfathomable body of water that our smartest people and most advanced machinery have yet to fully explore. Take the potential for that non-fiction, in-your-face curiosity; combine it with illustrations that you would eagerly hang on your wall, and succinct text that’s written via rhymes. My Dear Sea is an instant classic of an illustrated book. Its sublime charm will entice those who are a little bit curious and the meat of the book will draw them out to the sea in the most loving and curious of ways.
My Dear Sea is by author/illustrator Andre Carrilho and is available from Blue Dot Kids Press.
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