Time of Wonder

A family spends a summer on an island in Maine's Penobscot Bay, the days marked out by ordinary pleasures, rowing among the ledges, watching gulls wheel over the water, finding shells and starfish at low tide, waiting out fog that swallows the whole shoreline. McCloskey wrote and painted every page himself, working almost entirely in loose, sun and fog washed watercolor that often runs unbroken across two facing pages, a real departure from the sharp black and white pen lines he had used in Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal. The palette shifts with the weather, pale blue and silver on a still morning, gold at evening, then a churning gray green when a hurricane finally rolls in partway through the book, bending trees and driving the family indoors to wait it out by lamplight. The storm passes, and the last pages return to the same quiet tide pools and rowboats, the island simply itself again.

The text is written in the second person, addressing you directly rather than naming a specific child, which gives the whole book the feel of an invitation rather than a story told at a remove. It reads slowly on purpose, long, quiet sentences suited to being read aloud at bedtime rather than raced through, and it works best for children roughly three to eight who already enjoy looking closely at a picture rather than waiting for something to happen on every page. The hurricane section picks up real tension for a read aloud, wind and rain building sentence by sentence, before the calm return settles everything back down.