Waiting for High Tide

Starred review from January 25, 2016
In contrast to the economy of some of her earlier creations, McClure (In) is lavish with words and images in a story that is a worthy heir to Robert McCloskey’s work. The boy who narrates sits beside a tidal pool—it’s the Salish Sea, the afterword explains, off Olympia, Wash. He wants to swim, but it’s low tide: “It seems like I spend every day all hot summer long waiting for the water to creep back over the mud.” His family begins work on a raft of logs. On a beachcombing expedition, the boy turns up “a true score—sunglasses with one lens gone and the other covered with barnacles. Now I have Barnacle Vision!” In McClure’s meticulously executed cut-paper illustrations, barnacles carpet the rocks, and birds dive and swoop. As the raft progresses, the boy is allowed to handle a hatchet to notch the logs. After the raft is launched, the family swims back to land in their clothes in a moment of joyous anarchy. The sense of place is so rich that it seems possible to smell the air and hear the gulls. Ages 5–7. Agent: Steven Malk, Writers House.

Starred review from February 15, 2016
A child waits for the tide to rise, working alongside Mama and Papa to construct a log raft and observing coastal creatures the whole long, hot while. Readers turn over shells, clams, gulls, logs, mud, herons, crabs, rocks, salt, and seaweed as the child encounters the ever changing tidal world. The child's narration (flowing, lengthy, and studded with stunningly specific marine-life facts and observations) allows readers to experience the elongated day of waiting and elated discovery. The child's enthusiasm gives up pearls: "the best part about barnacles is the noise they make. Miles and miles of tiny plates shifting about make a crackly, squizzling sound. Maybe they tell stories of all they saw with that one eye as they swam about in the world?" 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. (Picture book. 4-10)

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March 1, 2016

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, MA

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2016
Grades K-2 *Starred Review* While waiting for high tide, Mama, Papa, and Grandma help a young boy build a raft from logs and poles washed up on the mudflats along the beach. A detailed page shows miscellaneous flotsam stranded by the outgoing tide: four clamshells, a bedraggled heron wing feather, and, a true score, pink sunglasses with one lens missing. Tough-shelled barnacles crackle and make a squizzling sound, gulls squawk, clams feed on plankton in the rising water, and the boy's family shares a picnic. The finished raft floats! Tied securely to an anchor, it's now a diving platform, and the family jumps off in giant splashes and swims to shore and back, again and again, as the rosy sunglasses drift into the sea and sink to the bottom. McClure's distinctive artworkintricate black paper cut-outs and fountain penhas 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)