50 Things To Do At The Beach, is obvious and folksy

Imagine that you’re an adult who has never been to the beach. It could be for any reason, maybe you live in the middle of the country, and getting to the coast wasn’t an option. Perhaps ‘going to the beach’ is more of a creative exercise, like people might think about the woods as deeply as Henry David Thoreau. For those people, you can say one activity any number of different ways and it counts as a new experience, even though the scenery and actions in doing so are almost identical. It’s not technically a case of double-counting something, but it’s awfully close. 50 Things To Do At The Beach is a beautifully presented book that’s long on aura, education, and presentation. It’s a visually pretty book that is also more at home in a doctor’s office or library, rather than actually being used at the beach.

That’s a bit ironic, isn’t it? 50 Things To Do At The Beach is more akin to beach activities for the chicken soup lovers soul. It’s not that the things in the book are useless. It’s more of the fact that adults unless they live in the middle of the country or have never been to a lake, river, or ocean, will know the things to do already.

That is not a bad thing entirely as the book could be used as a prompt for adults as they convey the information to children. We older people might not remember how many, minute things there are to do at the beach. It can be a cornucopia of sensory happiness. From the sound and smell of the waves, the fineness of each grain of sand, the multiple things that might wash up, and more.

50 Things To Do At The Beach takes that tact, an eco-friendly craft, the myriad of blues in the sky, various things and ways to eat sustainable seafood are just a couple of methods to enjoy the coast. The text in the book is at a middle school level but is very dry for them to read by themselves. If a parent goes over the book with kids then it’s something that the family can do together. If a parent reads the book by themselves then it is content that they’ve probably experienced before. The narrow sweet spot for 50 Things To Do At The Beach is those parents who use the book with their kids. However, even with that bullseye demographic, those older readers might be better served by just walking down to the water and using their imagination.

50 Things To Do At The Beach is by Easkey Britton, illustrated by Maria Nillson, and available on Princeton Architectural Press.

There are affiliate links in this post.