Wave

Don't attempt to read this book unless your preschooler has been to the beach. Wave is an adorable wordless story about a little girl having a conversation, entirely in body language, with the ocean. What I learned when I bought this book several months ago is that the ocean is an unbelievably difficult concept to explain, and even more so when the person you're explaining it to doesn't have a perfect grasp of the English language yet. Water as far as you can see? That's hard to imagine. Why on earth would huge amounts of water move back and forth like that? None of the water I've ever encountered moves of its own accord that way.  Seashells? What?

But your trip to the beach need not be long and involved. We took a trip to Los Angeles in December and spent an hour or so walking along the beach, piling up sand, watching the waves, and sticking our toes in the water (until that became too cold and scary). When we returned home, suddenly Wave was infinitely more comprehensible and more interesting.

The book shows a little girl at the beach "talking to" or playing a game with the waves of the ocean. She stands on the beach at first, watching. She runs away when the water comes toward her, then turns and threatens it back with her arms up over her head. She sticks her toe in, finds it's fun to splash, and kicks up a storm. But when a very large wave appears, she gets nervous and flees again, stopping at a safe distance to stick out her tongue with a "can't catch me" attitude. But she hasn't run far enough! The wave does catch her with such force that she's knocked off her feet. Drenched and seated on the beach as the wave recedes, she's thrilled to find a treasure trove of perfect seashells left behind. When her mother finally takes her home, she looks back over her shoulder in a visual pun--waving goodbye to the wave.

The author and illustrator has set up quite a challenge for herself in this book. Not only is it wordless, which requires her to tell the story entirely in pictures, the illustrations are limited to three colors: black, white, and blue. The scene is nearly identical page after page. A little girl, an ocean, some sand dunes in the background, and a flock of seagulls. Near the end we see some shells and the girl's mother, but most of the pages have nothing but these four elements. Nonetheless, the challenge is met beautifully, with evocative illustrations that are appreciably different from each other and tell a real story.

Once Charlie understood the concept of the ocean, he fell in love with this book. He loves to tell me the story, making "woosh" noises and waving his arms around to illustrate the waves moving back and forth. He points out the seashells and the starfish, and talks about the animals that live in the ocean (which he knows about from other books and from visiting the aquarium). It's a great way for him to remember his one brief trip to the beach, which probably won't be repeated for another year or so. This book is lots of fun, and very nice to look at.

Good Dog, Carl

Good Dog, Carl is yet another one of our nearly-wordless friends. It's about a mother who goes out to run some errands, leaving her baby in the care of a large black pet dog, Carl, while she's gone. Carl and the baby get in all kinds of exciting but messy adventures around the house, but Carl cleans everything up and puts the baby back to bed before the mother gets home, so she is none the wiser.

The illustrations in this book are very realistic drawings, but often two scenes, or a before-and-after, are shown on the same page without any lines in between. I've noticed that this is rather confusing to Charlie, thinking that there are two dogs or two babies instead of understanding the time-lapse. That's exactly why Montessori advocates a single picture on each page at this age. Still, this is an interpretive skill that kids need to learn, and a wordless book invites lots of discussion, so I haven't found it to be too much of a problem.

Charlie enjoys narrating this book to me, much more so than his other wordless books. I'm not sure whether that's something inherent in the story, perhaps it's more familiar or easier to follow, or whether it's just that I introduced this book at a slightly older age than our other wordless books, so he has more ability and less history of being read to from this book. This is generally a fun book, but not one of our all-time favorites.

Good Night, Gorilla

Good Night, Gorilla is an adorable little nearly-wordless book. A zookeeper walks through the zoo at night, saying goodnight to all the animals. ("Good night, [animal name]" are the only printed words.) Unbeknownst to him, the gorilla has stolen his keys, slipped out of his cage, and followed him around, letting out each animal after he says goodnight. The animals all follow the zookeeper home and curl up for the night in his bedroom. But the zookeeper's wife notices, and leads them all back to the zoo... except for the sneaky gorilla.

I think this was the first wordless book we got. I picked it up at a garage sale, and Charlie immediately fell in love with it, setting off a major phase of obsession with gorillas and monkeys. I'm not kidding when I say we probably read this fifteen times a day at one point.

I originally assumed that this story was decades old, for a couple of reasons. The style of drawing looks very classic 1950s, the house (and the wife in a nightgown and cap) also look very old-fashioned, and the zoo animals are kept in old-fashioned cages with bars, not at all like a modern zoo. But it turns out that it was written in 1994 and just stylized to look like the past. In any case, I will readily call this a modern classic.

The story has the potential to be very boring for adults, since it's repetitive and the illustration style is fine but not particularly gorgeous. But actually, there are a lot of "visual jokes" that you won't spot on the first (or third, or fifth) reading but that you'll notice in the background later. Just to give one example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, since I don't want to spoil it for you, the elephant has a Babar doll lying on the floor of his cage. Things like that. I always managed to notice a new one right when I was at the point of extreme aggravation at having to read the book "one more time" for Charlie.

Cute story, obsessive interest from child, and interest thrown in for the parents -- that all adds up to my highest recommendation.

The Lion & the Mouse

Charlie sometimes gets angry when I try to discuss a book with him, page by page, instead of reading the printed text. "Sing it, Mommy!" he demands.

To get around this problem, I went out and bought a bunch of picture books with no words. As soon as he figured out that there was no printed text to read, he became much more engaged in thinking through the stories himself.

The Lion & the Mouse, by Jerry Pinkney, is our favorite wordless book at the moment. The only words written on the pages are a few animal sounds: "Screech" for an owl and "Roar" for the lion and so forth. The watercolor paintings are so expressive that the well-known story is clearly told. Charlie and I talk about what happened and what will happen next as we turn the pages, and also about how the characters might be feeling. The pictures are also quite rich with detail in the backgrounds and the expressions of the animals. This book won the 2010 Caldecott Medal, and in my opinion, it was well deserved.

The story of the Lion & the Mouse is also a worthy one. It's a tale of unexpected friendship and repaying one good turn with another. These are lessons that I'm happy to teach to my son.