Mermaid Dreams

PreS-Gr 1–Maya simply loves the beach and eagerly awaits time to play with her parents. With bucket and shovel in hand, she asks them to play, but her parents want a moment to relax. Shy Maya is reluctant to search for new friends on her own but slowly closes her eyes and drifts into a dream-filled sleep where a brightly pattered underwater world of gouache and colored pencil images fills her vision with animals and sea plants. She has become a mermaid with a beautiful blue tail and searches the deep for the origin of sounds that call to her with the voice of a friend. What at first appears to be another mermaid turns out to be a new friend and together their imaginations swim freely. Text includes dialogue and a bit of page-to-page inference within a predicable simple narration, while underwater scenes contain the bright colors of sea animals and corals.