Beach - Hardcover

Elisha Cooper is the award-winning author of TRAIN, which received five starred reviews; FARM, which received starred reviews in THE HORN BOOK MAGAZINE and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY; and BEACH, which won the 2006 Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. Other picture books include A GOOD NIGHT WALK, MAGIC THINKS BIG, and DANCE!, a NEW YORK TIMES Best Illustrated Book of the Year. Elisha Cooper lives with his family in New York City. For more information, go to www.elishacooper.com.

Kikrus Starred Review
Another charmer from Cooper, who, with his signature impressionistic, diminutive figures and scenes, delivers a perfect day at the beach, observing people, paraphernalia and nature. Panoramic views appose Lilliputian visual narratives- a woman pulling a wagon packed with toys and kids, a boy pretending he's a sea turtle as the waves carry him out, kids building a sand castle and a dog barking at waves. People are depicted like embellished artists' wooden movable figures, jointed but anamorphous in detail, and the simple daubs of paint generate motion like a handful of animation cels or a flip book. Masterful page composition creates a cinematic effect by panning from double spreads of the far-reaching vista to close-up pages of layered tiers of miniature dioramic scenes that are both graceful and fluid. As soothing and satisfying as the spray from dancing waves, sand between your toes and sun-warmed, waist high water, this is as close as you can get to the beach without getting wet. As daylight ebbs, the beach empties but leaves behind "a day to remember when the beach is far away."

PW
Like Cooper's other picture books (Baseball ;Building ), this surfside exploration combines a prosaic text with loose, cartoon-like figures that detail the activities a careful observer can notice about a particular place. "Away to the beach! Away to sand and salt water, to rolling dunes and pounding waves," begins the straightforward narrative. Three vertical panels depict an empty stretch of beach, which gradually fills with people. Like the labeled illustrations in Richard Scarry's word books, several pages feature a plethora of tiny watercolor-and-pencil sketchbook drawings with one-sentence captions: "A woman changes into her swimsuit under her towel.... Two sisters fill buckets with sand and start building a sculpture.... Seagulls watch everything, hovering until made to move." Another spread brims with intriguing images of cloud shapes. The small, faceless figures resemble sophisticated drawings of an artist's wooden model positioned in various poses, as the scenes progress from early morning until dusk. But the text reads like commentary on an artist's notebook, with neither a conflict nor a plot to keep young readers involved. It may be more suitable as a meditation for older beachgoers. Ages 3-5.(June)

Booklist
K–Gr. 2. Cooper creates a paean to the pleasures of a day spent near, on, and in the water. Generous double-page spreads, which extend a full 20 inches across, convey an expansive sense of the sand and sky, and show the beach as it fills with bathers engaged in a variety of activities. Even the sky becomes crowded as clouds roll in. The pleasantly fluid watercolors, given definition by thin brush lines, work better on the panoramic double-page spreads than on pages with multiple vignettes, which, despite brief descriptive captions, lack enriching details. Even so, the book successfully evokes the fun and feeling of a day at the beach and the myriad things that can and do happen at the shore. Use this with John Burningham's humorous Time to Come Away from the Water, Shirley (1977). –John Stewig
Horn Book

Very few picture book creators dare to be as quiet as Elisha Cooper. Despite the large trim size and opening line ("Away to the beach!"), Cooper's Beach is not a place for exclamation points and action verbs. Beginning at daybreak and ending at sunset, we watch from a distance as people arrive, put up umbrellas and blankets, and settle in for the day. Cooper's loose pencil-and-watercolor art leaves out the faces, but the body positions and gestures of his people provide all the visual information we need for complete character studies. Spreads vary from long-lined horizons showing time slowly passing to close-ups of people, shells, or pebbles. This tribute to the seashore prompts Cooper's strongest text to date; each time it seems in danger of taking itself too seriously, Cooper injects a child-centered detail. Describing waves: "They come in boisterous and loud / and they leave with a quiet pull. / Waves are nature's roller coaster. / The perfect wave lifts high and drops low, and can be felt in the stomach." At book's end, the sun-drenched beachgoers pack up and head home; readers who have spent the day with them will have to resist the urge to shake sand out of their shoes. LOLLY ROBINSON

SLJ
PreS-Gr 3–“As the day begins, the beach is empty, waiting to be filled.” Cooper opens with a gorgeous stretch of sand in sun-flecked, amber-white watercolors, bounded by a sea so darkly blue that it seems still half-asleep. In the following pages, he tells the story, mainly in detailed splashes of paint, of the people and things that transform the quiet area into a lively spot. Readers will enjoy the affectionate portraits of swimmers, kite-flyers, sunbathers, seagulls, and barking dogs. A struggle with an inner tube or a beach umbrella, the people who go into the water but forget that they are still wearing their glasses, the clouds that look like spilled popcorn: here, as in life, it's the little things that snag readers' attention. Cooper's portrayal of a day at the shore is generous with such minutiae; his fondness for his subject is evident and infectious. As the beach once again empties at the end of the story, it's tempting to return to the first page, to a hundred possible activities at the shore–none of which is more earthshaking than a toppled sandcastle.–Susan Weitz, formerly at Spencer-Van Etten School District, Spencer, NY