Book Review: What Is a River?

Title: What Is a River?

Author: Monika Vaicenaviciene

Date: 2019 (in Swedish), 2021 (in English)

Publisher: Enchanted Lion

ISBN: 978-1-59270-279-4

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: by the author

Quote: "A river travels to many places: prairies and cities, dense forests and lush meadows, steppes and tundra, mountains and valleys." 

Of the five books Enchanted Lion sent me this is the one I would have liked most in primary school. It's a picture book for a reader who wants to learn something and won't be scared by words like "estuary" and "capybara." Early in the book readers meet the word "delta." "Delta" is one of the words I can remember learning, from a Golden Book Encyclopedia entry, when I was five years old. What Is a River? is written on the same level as the Golden Book Encyclopedia, with enough pretty pictures to fascinate pre-reading children and enough information to be a worthwhile first book for uninformed adults. 

It's a story: Grandchild sits on the bank beside Grandmother, who is embroidering, and asks Grandmother to tell about the river. Grandmother obliges with a delightful overview of fact, fiction, fantasy, and folklore about rivers. Her sources of information are international, Internet-friendly, with fun facts about a river on every real continent and about some imaginary rivers. There's a little about shipping, a little about dams, a little about the wildlife that can be found near rivers. 

It's a beautiful study in the colors of water. If working at a computer leaves you wishing your child had and enjoyed that old "picture" book, Black Black Beautiful Black, these studies in blue, grey, green, and sand-colors may be the next best thing for your tired eyes. There's an actual physical chemical in our eyes that is depleted when we look at screens, paper, lights, and white, red, yellow, or brown things, and restored when we look at blue, green, grey, and black things. That makes this book literally a sight for sore eyes, something that will actually make adults feel good when we read it with children.

It leaves readers with an appetite for more information--and the keywords they can use to start looking up more facts. 

One way this book could be improved is the typefont. The age at which children learn to read is determined by the developmentof their eyea.. Girls' eyes often mature enough for them to enjoy reading at age six or earlier. Boys who know how to read, in theory, may be reluctant, slow, or poor readers up to age ten just because they're not yet able to see the print clearly. Picture books are usually printed with large clear "Roman" type, to allow as many primary school children to read as much as possible. This one's printed in one of those terribly cute fonts that look like hand lettering, 12-point or even 10-point, smaller than the letters I tell Google to display on your screen at this web site. Precocious readers may enjoy the sophisticated look of small type. Less precocious readers, and adults with tired eyes, may not only find it hard to read unfamiliar words in an unfamiliar font, but fail to notice some of the informative captions. This is very much an artist's book; I suspect the Swedish edition really was hand-printed.

Still, this book is a joy and a delight, just as it is. If your tired eyes appreciate the pictures but can't read the captions, I'll print a samizdat copy for you.