Pool

An inviting jacket pulls readers into this quietly engrossing wordless book. The title appears on the cover in clean sans serif type, its double letter Os echoed in the illustration below: a pair of perfectly round (think John Lennon) swim goggles on the perfectly round head of a young swimmer. (The otherworldly fishlike creatures emerging from the boy’s lenses tell readers to expect something more exciting than a swim lesson.) The story begins as the boy approaches a pristine and empty pool -- only to have a crowd of mostly grownup people, in a variety of body shapes, stampede past him into the water. The disagreeable group fills the entire length of the pool, and, ironically, no one is actually swimming; all are bobbing about on inflatable tubes and rafts. Undaunted, the boy dives in, neatly swimming below the mass of legs, where he meets another young swimmer; together, boy and girl discover a strange and beautiful underwater world of fantastic Shaun Tan–esque creatures. Using colored pencils and oil pastels, Korean illustrator Lee employs color to contrast the two realities: until the boy enters the pool, the only hue on the cream pages is the blue of the water -- now, the two underwater swimmers and everything around them are in color, and when they eventually leave the pool, the colors stay with them. The final page hints at further adventures as the last person out of the pool -- a young girl from that noisy crowd -- turns and catches an enticing glimpse of the underwater creatures. jennifer m. brabander

In this quietly engrossing wordless book, a boy dives into a pool--neatly swimming below a disagreeable mass of grownups bobbing about on inflatable tubes--and meets another young swimmer. Together, boy and girl discover a strange and beautiful underwater world of fantastic Shaun Tan–esque creatures. Colored-pencil and oil pastel illustrations use color to contrast the two realities.