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The Seashore Book |
 In Charlotte's
The Seashore Book, a little boy asks his mother "What is the seashore like?" Her
sensuous, detail, child's-eye description brings a day at the seaside so alive
to him (for "he lived in the mountains and had never seen the sea.")
that by the end of her recounting --- with his eager questions --- he can say,
"I like the seashore a lot, and now I can always close my eyes and be there
the way I was just now with you." (Cover, by Wendell
Minor, shown left.)Published in 1992 by HarperCollins and edited by Robert Warren, the large
book is extraordinarily illustrated with paintings by artist Wendell Minor. A
Reading Rainbow selection, The Seashore Book has been called " A
graceful, handsomely produced tribute to a favorite childhood experience, "
by Kirkus Reviews, and "Poetically descriptive," by the
Horn
Book. "Minor's lovely paintings heighten the serene nature of the book,
" continues Horn Book, " which reads almost like a guided
meditation. A useful and relaxing story for bedtime or any time."
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| In some ways the book is similar to Charlotte's The
Moon Was the Best. In that book, a
mother imagines Paris for her daughter, image by sight by sound, for her eager
daughter, in the way the mother in The Seashore Book
does for her
son. |
 But in both cases, the text ends with an affirmation of emotional
closeness, in Moon from mother to daughter and in Seashore from
son to mother, as if to say, "The world and its places may be wondrous
indeed, whether experienced directly or imagined, but what really matters is how
people feel about each other."
(Is it the sea or the feelings that
matter in The Seashore Book?
Both, this lovely painting of Wendell Minor's seems to suggest.) |
| Two personal postscripts |
| Personal P.S. #1: Like many couples, Charlotte and her husband Maurice
had certain songs which were "theirs". When they were young, it was Stardust.
In middle age, it was The Shadow of Your Smile, the theme from the
movie The Sandpiper. In the Zolotow household, though, the song was
always known just as Sandpiper. Hmmmm... |
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| Personal P.S. #2 : Charlotte was born on June 26, making her
astrological sign Cancer, the crab. Hmmmmm.... |
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