SAL BOAT

A boy can build a boat by himself, but launching it is another matter.

Small in body but large in determination, solitary Sal starts his newest project by ransacking his mom’s garage and then proceeding to gather old boards, discarded paint, and seemingly random junk from all over his small seaside town. What he constructs has walls, windows, and a peaked roof. But Sal shrugs off the skeptical comments of passersby (“What, have they never seen a boat before? Zero imagination in this town”). When it’s done, it is indeed a (house)boat and, in the luminous illustrations, a magnificent one, solidly assembled from bric-a-brac and splashed with intense colors. Triumph gives way to frustration, though, as an onlooker’s question about how he’s going to drag it down to the shoreline leads to a series of devastating failures. Along with effectively capturing the setting’s small-town feel in her watercolors, Heder depicts a light-skinned protagonist whose changing facial expressions and body language offer a positive study as he goes from intense, scowling concentration to delight, dismay, then despair, resignation, and, bit by bit, anger. But just as he’s about to smash his boat to splinters, up come all the townsfolk with flags, balloons, and a construction hoist to pitch in and see the great launch done right. A final view of the floating house out on the water at sunset, strung with party lights and surrounded by boatloads of diversely hued neighbors, ends the episode on a properly celebratory note. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A literally buoyant reminder that sometimes it takes a village.