Waiting for High Tide

There’s a boy who’s by the ocean somewhere and he is waiting for the tide to get higher so he can swim. He has to wait six hours each day for the tide, and six hours is a long time to wait! It is boring waiting, but today is going to be better, because today, he and his father are going to make a raft with his mother and grandmother. He searches in the mud to find stuff. He finds some glasses with one lens gone, and the other covered with barnacles. Then they all make the raft, and finally the tide comes in enough for them to move it into the water. Then they can jump off the raft again and again, and they know they can come back and do it again tomorrow.

“This day of waiting is over. The water quiets around us. Bubbles in our wake pop and fade.”

The book Waiting for High Tide by Nikki McClure is an okay story – I don’t like it, but I don’t dislike it either. But I don’t like the illustrations very much. They are not very colorful, mostly a gray-blue, and black and white, but that is not what makes me not like them. I like the pictures that are only of the animals, like the crabs and barnacles, but I don’t like the pictures of the people. It sounds like the family is having fun, and that they had a good time making the raft, and I like the way the boy tells about what they did and also what he sees and does while he is there on the beach at the ocean. If this book didn’t have the pictures of the people, I would really like it a lot.

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