Alex Godard

This is a lovely story about little Cecile who lives on a West Indies island with her grandparents while her mother has employment across the sea. The child misses her mother terribly, and every day she waits and watches the water to see if her mother will return.

There is a lot of gentle imagery in the book, and the images and story line work well together. The artist captures depth of feelings with his creative illustrations.

Story about a girl whose mother has gone away, presumeably to the U.S. to work. There is a somewhat complicated story-within-a-story here that will be hard for younger children to understand, but the pages about a girl who misses her mother are easy for kids to relate to.