Swashby and the Sea

A week before her seventh birthday, my daughter lost her very first tooth. Thankfully, the tooth fairy had already prepared (several weeks in advance) to honour this special occasion with the traditional gift under the pillow. To each tooth fairy their own, I suppose. My own father never had such a tradition growing up; the firstborn child of recent immigrants to Canada, his family's tradition was to throw the lost tooth onto the roof of the house and make a wish. To be honest, I didn't even have the gift under the pillow tradition growing up—my childhood tooth fairy always left a coin. This was always agreeable and often exciting, but I remember reading a Franklin book about the tooth fairy as a child, wherein she leaves Franklin a box of crayons instead of a coin, and I always thought that was nice. So it came to be that my daughter awoke the morning after losing her first tooth to find a fresh copy of Swashby and the Sea under her pillow.

May I just begin by saying that Swashby is a terrific name for a retired sea captain—something about it is just so briney, so sublimely sea-captainy; it seems to elicit the 'woosh' of the waves lapping against the body of the ship, the salty sea air spritzing over the deck. Swashby may be retired now, but he remains close friends with the sea, happy to live out his days alone in a little hut as close to the water as he can be. Antisocial and reclusive, he is distinctly incensed when a young girl and her grandmother move in next door and try to be (Swashby shudders with contempt) neighbourly. In an effort to make these feelings of his very clear (without actually having to interact with people, of course) Swashby leaves a series of unfriendly messages in the sand: "no trespassing"; "now vanish"; "please go away".

His old friend the sea, however, has other ideas and modifies the text of these indelicate messages... just a little. Soon they read things like "play", "wish", and "sing". The little girl next door obliges (singing, wishing, and playing) until finally, the sea decides to be a tad more deliberate and to really stir things up. Slowly but surely prevailed upon to do more than hide alone in his hut, Swashby begins to realize how pleasant life can be when you share it with others.

What a delight this book is! My daughter and I have read it many times over now and I would highly recommend it to anyone. The pictures are so beautiful. I love the details in them: the way the patterns on a cup or a towel are so cohesive, the motif of blue (especially the more pronounced, deep blues mingling with the tropical ones), the way the water's personality is as much a part of the pictures as it is of the text, if not more so.

See for yourself!

You can have the whole book read to you in the video below:

And if you're reading this, Tooth Fairy, thank you very much! We really loved this book and (no pressure), but we enjoyed the beach theme so much that See You Next Year by Andrew Larsen might be a good choice for her second tooth, which—as you probably know—is already wiggling.

-Victoria Murgante

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