As everything is always new to a 2 year old, I like to prepare Bean for upcoming trips and holidays by scouring the library. This past week, she got the seashore treatment.

Here were the winners:

1. Beach by Elisha Cooper — simple and whimsical watercolor sketches depict all the various people you’ll find at the beach and what they’re doing: a woman dressing under a towel, a baby tip toe-ing in the water, two teenagers laying in the sun, a man wading in to his knees. A wonderful and often amusing introduction to a day at a public beach.

2. Sand Castle by Brenda Shannon Yee — this tells a simple, familiar story and was by far Bean’s favorite. A little girl, Jen, is building a sand castle at the beach. Little by little, other children wander up and ask what she’s doing and if they can help. At the end of the day, they all say goodbye and promise to meet up again tomorrow. The story was simple enough for Bean to follow, and she’s obsessed with making friends when we go places, so this may have come across as an instructional guide on how to do just that.

3. The Seashore Book by Charlotte Zolotov — This book is beautiful. A little boy who lives in the mountains asks his mom what the seashore is like. She poetically imagines a day for them at the beach. The language was still a bit too over Bean’s level, so I ad-libbed and mostly described the paintings to her. The paintings of the Massachusetts and Monhegan Island (Maine) coastlines alone are worth getting the book.

4. Wave by Suzy Lee — SO DELIGHTFUL AND WONDERFUL. This was the family favorite. It is a series of paintings (no words), showing a little girl running to the beach with her mother, running away from waves, sticking her tongue out at waves, splashing and kicking waves, then washing her hands in the water before it’s time to go home. It’s only about 8 or 9 frames, but what images they are. The paintings burst with a little girl’s energy and excitement, and the joy on each page is contagious.

Send in your seashore book recommendations, too! I’m always on the hunt for good children’s books.