SAND IN MY SHOES
by Wendy Kesselman & illustrated by Ronald Himler
A rhyming story about the pangs of leaving the beach house at summer's end. A little girl says goodbye to ocean, dunes, shells, gulls, the freshwater pond, boats, buoys, foghorns, and even, in pages reminiscent of Robert McCloskey's classic Time of Wonder (1957), to rainy nights and hurricanes. Back in the city, the shells in her pocket and sand in her shoes remind her that the ocean house is awaiting her return next year. The subtle tones of Himler's watercolor and gouache paintings capture the look of sea and northeastern shore under the diffused, late-season light as well as the smoggy, filmed-over gray of the city. A grouping of this book, the McCloskey, Alison Shaw's recent Until I Saw the Sea (p. 475), Charlotte Zolotow's The Seashore Book (1992), and Burton Albert's Where Does the Trail Lead? (1991) makes a splendid exercise in comparison and contrast: similar settings, varied illustrative media, different literary forms, same intense evocation of a child's affinity for the seashore. (Picture book. 4- 8)