How do you get into the pool? Are you the “jump-right-in” sort? Or the “one-toe-at-a-time” sort? We’re remaining out the summer time with Our Pool — a pleased, colourful, image e-book ode to the rituals of the neighborhood pool — the “cachunk” of the lockers, the sliminess of the sunblock, the splash of the cannonballs.
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Author and illustrator Lucy Cummins loves to take her son swimming and their easiest pool days impressed this e-book. “Nate and I had had a particularly great day,” Cummins remembers. “He made friends in the pool. It’s so interesting to watch children just kind of make those connections, even if they’re just for that day.”
Nate is 8 now, and he nonetheless loves to lock his hands round his mother’s neck and “float behind her like a cape.” Cummins’ representation presentations a parade of children placing onto their grownups winding via pool. She spells out “big m o o n m a n steps” to sluggish readers down, giving them the sensation of being dragged in the course of the water.
The New York City pool in Cummins’ e-book is a bustling, various, neighborhood house. “I’m telling the story of a day with Nate and I at the pool,” Cummins says, however any of those children may well be the e-book’s narrator — and that is the reason on objective. “I hope it comes across that it’s kind of the day anyone can have — and that we’re all having,” she says.
Universal studies and shared areas are a part of the magic of town residing. When Cummins become a guardian in New York City she started to respect “how the community is shaped around bringing people together — like libraries and playgrounds and public parks and public swimming pools. I’ve had so many friendships that have started just kind of incidentally, through interactions that my kids have initiated.”
Cummins made the artwork for Our Pool in 2019. By the time she was once writing the textual content it was once the center of the pandemic and the pool was once closed.
“I went from having a very open world and a very connected experience of living in a city alongside other parents, and suddenly that all closed in,” she remembers.
Cummins introduced the e-book to her editor no longer understanding if she would ever swim in a public pool once more. “It was really putting a wish into the universe, especially as a parent.” She’s so thankful that want got here true.
