One Wish. Frances Wolfe. Toronto, ON: Tundra Books, 2004. 32 pp., cloth, $22.99. ISBN 0-88776-662-5. Subject Headings: Seashore-Juvenile fiction. Cottages-Juvenile fiction. Preschool-grade 1 / Ages 3-6. Review by Liz Greenaway. **** /4

excerpt:

On a summer's eve, a long time ago, I made one wish on the brightest star in a twinkling night sky. I wished for a cottage by the sea. A cottage that would stand in a fragrant field of Queen Anne's lace, which would nod and sway to a melody only it could hear. My cottage would be yellow and have a sunny porch, wrapped in pink twining roses, where I could sit with a little friend on lazy afternoons. Sometimes I would take a small boat to the shore to watch her glide over the cool, clear water, the wind tugging at her sails.

In One Wish, the young narrator wishes upon a star for a cottage by the sea and goes on to describe how she might spend her days at the cottage. The text is simple and straightforward, and the beautiful oil illustrations don't take the text further so much as they allow the reader to drop into the reader's world for a day. The narrator moves from night through the day to night again. The visual twist is that the narrator ages ever so slightly in each spread until at the end she is revealed to be an elderly woman, smiling on her cottage porch, with her cat sleeping on her knee, saying:

And, at the end of the day, I would sit on my porch and watch the moon rise up out of the sea to join the brightest star in the twinkling night sky. The same star I made one wish upon so many years ago. You see....

Wishes can come true!

     Frances Wolfe won the Ann Connor Brimer Award and the Amelia-Frances Howard-Gibbon Award for illustration for her first book, Where I Live. The response will no doubt be as warm for her second picture book. One Wish serves as a visual love letter to the seaside, and Nova Scotia in particular. As Karen Reczuch evoked the prairies for evocatively in The Dust Bowl, so Wolfe's illustrations create a sense of being at the seaside. Wolfe realistically captures every detail of the Nova Scotian seaside, complete with shimmering waves and sunny yellow houses. The artist's oil paintings are monochromatic in one spread, realistically capturing the earnest wish-making of the young girl, and dazzling in another, showing the detail and perfection in beach treasures like starfish and shells.

     One Wish is a treasure itself and would be a perfect addition to any home or school library.

Liz Greenaway has worked in publishing and bookselling and now resides in Edmonton, AB, far away from the Nova Scotian seaside.

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Published by The Manitoba Library Association ISSN 1201-9364

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