A Boy, His Dog, and the Sea
by Anthony Browne; illus. by the author
Primary    Candlewick    32 pp.
6/24    9781536234138    $18.99

A dull day at the seaside yields to heart-pounding action. Danny’s mother suggests that her mopey son take the dog for a walk on the beach, encouraging him to: “Keep your eyes open; you never know what you might see.” In trademark Browne fashion (Hide and Seek, rev. 11/18; What If…?, rev. 9/14), stable, symmetrical compositions echo Danny’s mood as he and Scruff, a hairy yellow terrier mutt who embodies his name, pass glum beachside cottages to reach a bland, featureless beach beneath lowering gray clouds. Scruff’s delight in a game of fetch lifts Danny’s spirits, and the boy is further engaged when he spots faces and shapes in the beach rocks, studying them intently. Then he notices people waving at a far-off speck in the water who appears to be waving back. “Fetch!” he tells Scruff, and the dog obliges, swimming “on and on and on” in an edge-of-your-seat three-page sequence. Four half-page panels limit readers to Danny’s foreshortened views of Scruff nearing the tiny, floundering figure and then slowly, slowly swimming back; the visual pacing is highly effective. A whale jumps joyfully in the background as Scruff leads the exhausted swimmer—Danny’s older brother!—out of the surf against a now-bright-blue sky. Both a terribly high-stakes adventure and a celebration of the act of looking closely—a favored theme of Browne’s—this day at the beach will have young readers riveted.

Pubissue-From the March/April 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.