See Henry and Mudge Seize Fun By the Sea

Tomorrow, I am headed to sunny San Diego. Sunny, snowless San Diego. I'll be so warm I won't know what to do with myself. I may even go swimming when we stop by one of those sandy beaches, or at least wave-hopping. Young Henry and his dad do their fair share of leaping into the crashing waves in Henry and Mudge and the Forever Sea, the sixth book in the easy reader series by Cynthia Rylant, author of the Poppleton and Mr. Putter and Tabby and Tabby books, and illustrated by Sucie Stevenson. Mudge isn't brave enough to embrace the ocean water of his own free will - at least not at first - but he gets plenty wet watching Henry from a close distance.

This 45-page book is broken up into four sections: To the Beach, The Forever Sea, Brave Dog and Good-bye, Crab. Henry's mom is absent in this book; it's an excursion just for the boys, and each of them is excited, preparing for it in his own way. Henry brings green goggles, a yellow bucket, an orange shovel and a red dump truck. Mudge has a bag containing a blue bowl, a jug of water, half a bone and a tennis ball. And Henry's dad totes a book about shells, six towels, and - my favorite prop in the book - a big red rubber lobster. Henry's dad is such a goofball. (One thing nobody brings along is sunblock; I'm thinking those guys were pretty lucky not to wind up as red as Dad's lobster by the end of the day...)

Once they arrive at the beach, there's plenty of opportunity for fun and adventure, with splashing in the spray, building sand castles and wolfing down hot dogs. And Mudge gets a chance to prove that he's not as big a wimp as he initially appears to be on this first time at the beach. Stevenson's drawings effectively convey all the fun inherent in such a prospect, and as always, Rylant's prose is brief but descriptive.

I live in a city with a peninsula, so once the weather warms up, a jaunt to the beach is not an unlikely possibility. Kids who aren't so geographically lucky can live vicariously through Henry and Mudge until they can take a trip to the beach of their own.