Harry by the Sea

brilliant invitation to readers

The "Harry" series by Zion and Graham remain monumental fixed images in the memories of my youth. I teach rhetoric in a Japanese university and stumbled upon these books in the children's reading section of our school's library. My seven-year-old daughter had fished "Harry by the Sea" out of one of the shelves and brought it to me. What a stroke of serendipity! In seeing the cover, I was immediately taken back to my youth. Wow! The story of Harry invited me so often to its pages that I can still remember all of the details. These books represent a brilliant blend of narrative and illustration. Graham's ability to capture the level of expression on the faces of the characters in pastels is amazing. Zion's introduction to simple, compound and complex sentences is a perfect primer for young readers. In their ability to arrest a young reader's attention, these works are easily on the level of Seuss's.