Not as clever as van Lieshout's Bloom! A Little Book About Finding Love, this small-format, paper-over-board picture book features a seal hero who wakes up feeling sad. With sparse b&w cartoons splashed with blue and yellow and in succinct text, van Lieshout deftly depicts the downhearted seal as he looks out at the horizon, sobbing: "Don't bother rising today, sun." But he feels worse when the sun heeds his request and floats toward him instead. Like a circus seal, Splash bounces the yellow sun higher and higher, eventually pushing it into place and recovering his own spirits: "The sun is up... and so am I." As in Bloom, the book's chief strength is the interplay of the expressive drawings and the concise text, supported by gutsy typographical treatment. Words grow to Brobdingnagian heights ("Why me?" dominates a spread of a miserable Splash alone on a tiny ice floe) and create movement (as in "boing," shown multiply in yellow, in various sizes, to reinforce the bouncing ball). The design, credited to Molly Leach, deserves top marks. All ages. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

PreS-Gr 2-In this deceptively simple book, a down-in-the-dumps seal, like many young readers, views things in black and white, in terms of success and failure. Though his friends invite him to play, Splash doesn't feel like swimming. However, when he's challenged to a race, he can't resist and jumps into the water, but the current carries him away, causing the others to laugh at him. Spotting a yellow orb drifting in the distance, he sobs, "Don't bother rising today, sun." As the object floats closer, Splash whispers, "OH, NO.I've brought the sun down." He apologizes and attempts to push it back into the sky, but it keeps coming back to him. However, with every bounce, the "sun shined a bit brighter.. And Splash did, too." The story concludes with Splash's final push and his declaration: "The sun is up.and so am I!" The last spread shows two smiling seals playing beneath a warmed-by-yellow sky. Set against white backgrounds, the artwork pairs spare lines with blue watercolor washes. Onomatopoeia enlivens the simple text. This tale conveys feelings from a child's point of view, depicting the way that youngsters perceive their world and suggesting that they can control their destiny. Splash brings sunshine to a gloomy day.-Marian Creamer, Children's Literature Alive, Portland, OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.