GO, BOATS, GO!

A cavalcade of boats both realistic and whimsical.

“Old boats. New boats. / One-or-two boats. // Tall boats. Small boats. / Heave-and-haul boats.” So begins Boswell’s playful, rhythmic, and compact text. Mostov’s illustrations, which are graphically simple and pleasingly two-dimensional in dark and bold colors, depict a wide range of floating apparatuses, mostly in profile. There are human-powered boats, such as kayaks, a dinghy, and pedal-powered boats, and nature- and machine-powered vehicles, such as a few types of sailboats, submarines, a motorboat, and an airboat. As the text goes on, they grow quite fanciful and include a sailboat carried aloft by balloons and sea-horse– and flamingo-shaped vessels. Seemingly in order to cram in as many as possible, some of the pages cut the boats off in unsatisfying ways, and boat-obsessed toddlers may be disappointed they don’t see a full image of a shipwreck or a container ship. Although there’s a clichéd white, bearded sea captain with a bird on the shoulder, a diverse group of folks pilot these crafts and include multiracial crews on several boats and a brown-skinned family clad in modern gear and paddling a traditional-looking canoe.

A playful excursion for young mariners.