Beach Ball by Peter Sis

Beach Ball by Peter Sis

Rating: 4.5 stars

We went to the library last week to get some books for our fall beach trip and happened upon this one.  Since we liked Fire Truck by Peter Sis, I went to see if there were any other books by him that we might like.  How perfect to find this one!  What wasn't perfect was not realizing how great a car book it really was...until we got down to the beach.  Lorelei could have easily studied this book for an hour in the car, which would have given me only four other hours to fill with something else.

The book is a look-and-find, but not of the usual variety.  The story line which hardly exists at all is just that a little girl's beach ball gets swept up by the wind and she chases it across the beach, through all of the pages of the book.  On each page is a different theme of things you need to find.  On one page are shapes, so you can see how many triangles you can find or just how many different shapes exist.  On another page are numbers, and you count all the different things--that was Lorelei's favorite page.  On another is a too-easy maze and on the trickiest page is the alphabet.  The reader is challenged to find something that starts with each letter of the alphabet.  It's tricky and fun.  It definitely kept my interest for awhile!

This is an old-ish book, printed in 1990, and it definitely could be more than what it is--the book could be bigger and hold more, the illustrations could be more charming and/or funnier, the setting could be different in each book.  I can hardly imagine the awesome result if another illustrator got his or her hands on the idea and ran with it!  I really wish Robert Nuebecker or Rotraut Susanne Berner would do something like this...