Granville Island ABC: A Family Adventure

If you have visited Vancouver, there’s a good chance you have visited, or at least heard of, Granville Island. This small island has been immortalized in Alison Kelly and Linda Sharp’s Granville Island ABC: A Family Adventure. This rhyming alphabet book gives insight into the attractions of the island and glimpses into its history.

Many Vancouverites love Granville Island. Its market, its restaurants and theatres, and its small and unique shops are nestled together in a charming locale surrounded by water. More still have a love/hate relationship with the island, finding it packed with tourists in the summer and difficult to access by vehicle. This touristy interpretation of the island seems to be the one highlighted in Granvillle Island ABC. While the book does speak to the island’s numerous parks and shouts out the boat houses of the few residents who make the island their home, it largely seems to serve as a type of advertisement for the wonderful offerings of the island.

Each two-page spread uses the same layout: one page features an illustration, the other features a rhyming phrase or couplet highlighting a letter as it relates to the island. This is followed by one or two paragraphs of context, often featuring another example of the letter. A banner of sorts runs the length of both pages, incorporating images related to the text found on that page. As an example, the S page features one of Granville Island’s notorious seagulls who swoop down at the food of unsuspecting visitors. The banner along the bottom features sandwiches, salmon, starfish, and squid, marrying both the nautical theme and the theme of food. These are rendered in a realistic style. This is perhaps the book’s cleverest element and will likely be a draw to children who might enjoy trying to figure out which images relate to the page’s letter.

There are two small issues with the text that give me some pause. One is that the rhyming couplet/phrase format seems geared towards a young audience, but the contextual paragraphs below them are often quite long. This could work as a book read with a child, with the child reading the rhymes and an adult reading the paragraph, but I do wonder who this was written for. The text comes across as though it was written by someone who is passionate about the island, which is wonderful, but it is perhaps a bit heavy-handed, evidenced by the fact that more than once I glanced through the front and back matter to see if this book had been commissioned by an organization to promote the island to tourists. The other issue is that many of the paragraphs refer to parts of the island, or ask questions, as though the reader is there holding the book. On the first page, the reader is asked, “How many different kind of arts and crafts can you see?” On the next, they are instructed in which direction to look to find a bridge and asked, “Can you find it now?” This might work if the images were presented in such a way that the answer to the question could be found within them, but they are not. The book also does not open with a map to which the reader could refer in order to orient themselves to the text.

The book ends with some back matter that gives more information on Granville Island and its history. There is a very brief mention of the pre-colonial history of the island as a place of significance for local Indigenous nations. It would have been nice to see this history featured somehow in the main body of the work, perhaps in the place of one of the numerous mentions of industry and amenities. Given that the publisher includes a land acknowledgment on the copyright page, and the back matter, itself is, in part, a land acknowledgement, there is a missed opportunity here to put that acknowledgment into action by including this history in the text.

Granville Island ABC will likely have some appeal to people local to Vancouver or who have visited. It is full of interesting information and has some beautiful images that some children may be drawn to. That said, it strikes me more as a book you might find in a ‘local interest’ section of a bookstore than with the picture books. It would make a solid purchase for BC libraries and schools and could find a home in collections looking to increase their Canadian and/or travel content.