The whale in my swimming pool

SWIMMING POOLS LOOM giant in the imaginations of children. They're symbols of summer, and of vacations. The big ones can be vast and terrifying. The kiddie ones can be conquered. If we learn to swim, most of us in America first learn how in pools. Gary Clement's "Swimming, Swimming" is the story of an ordinary day spent at the community pool by a bunch of earnest and ardent kid swimmers. Its theme is the joy of playing with your friends on a hot day, but it also conveys that these guys aspire to athletic prowess. The central character has posters of swimming competitions on his bedroom walls. He sleeps with his goggles on the floor next to him. He and his friends (two other boys and a girl, a mix of apparent ethnicities) practice their strokes as they walk the sunny sidewalk to the pool. Clement's ink and watercolor illustrations are squiggly and silly. They read as comic, but not raucous. People have weird separated teeth and long tongues. Sometimes, they don't seem to have elbows. Almost everyone wears flip-flops or hippie sandals. This relaxed vibe makes "Swimming, Swimming" a good instructive book for young readers who might not swim yet: Here's what big kids do when they get good at it. Here is what people learn in swim class. Doesn't it look fun? See the big kids taking showers without a fuss? The book is wordless until the friends get in the water, as if nothing matters in their day until they're thoroughly wet. Then they burst into a version of the familiar favorite: "Swimming, swimming/in a swimming pool./When days are hot/when days are cold/in a swimming pool." When they're out of the water, the book is wordless once again. They go home. The central boy eats dinner and feeds his fish. He goes to sleep. That's it. A day of sunshine and exercise. The endpapers are delightful. They depict the children swimming each of the major strokes in four steps. The pictures are funny and informative, the swimmers athletic but far from intimidating. For Clement, the pool is a place for community and skillbuilding. In Joyce Wan's "The Whale in My Swimming Pool," a tiny Asian-American-looking hero finds an enormous and recalcitrant blue whale in his tiny backyard kiddie pool. The setting is suburban. Roses bloom, bees buzz. Bluebirds look on merrily. The whale will not get out of the pool. The boy wants it out. This is a classic problem. Never has a young child shared anything so awesome as a kiddie pool completely without conflict. First, the boy counts to 10. He tells the whale it "better be gone!" Nope. It's still there. Then he pushes it. It doesn't budge. "Why not the pool next door?" he asks. "They have the best pool on the block!" The whale doesn't answer, but an aerial view shows us that a great white shark now inhabits the neighbor's pool. The boy's attempts at a solution get more and more inventive, but the whale remains where it is, smiling sweetly even through the hero's temper tantrum. Finally, they achieve harmony when the whale begins to spout water, and the boy cools off in the spray. Wan's book imagines the pool as property over which a child feels ownership - and explores the whale-size challenges of sharing space and toys, for little ones. Wan is a greeting card designer and the creator of many board books. Her curvilinear and comforting style recalls Hello Kitty and other Japanese pop art in its fat dark lines and squat characters, but the hero has an antic physicality and a wide range of emotional expressions. Her world feels safe and joyful, even as the hero experiences anger and frustration. BY CONTRAST, JIHYEON LEE'S wordless "Pool" invites us into an unstable and magically beautiful place. Originally published in Korea, the book depicts a public swimming pool that's symbolized at first by nothing more than white space, into which a boy gazes. His swim cap is on. So are his goggles. He is sketchily drawn in shades of gray and has wildly sloped shoulders: a column of a boy, fading out into the white around him. On the next page we see a long shot: He stands before an empty pool. It's blue on a slightly pink page. A horde of revelers arrive with inner tubes. Old and young, dark and pale, fat and thin, they are colorless and often cranky, united by their maniacal enthusiasm for inflatable plastic. They fill the pool completely. These are the surface dwellers. The boy is intimidated by them but nonetheless dives deep, swimming below their chaotic tumble of legs and flippers. The pages fill with bright colors as he enters a fantasy world beneath. He finds a friend, a girl in a red suit. Together they discover schools of fish with mammoth eyes, others that look like birds, eels with spiky horns and creatures with mouths of vicious teeth. Eventually they come face to face with a monstrous, almost furry whale. It is a change in perspective. The people seem tiny. The two swimmers have realized the vastness of the planet beneath the sea. Its creatures and the lives they lead dwarf humanity. As the children rise to the air, they are transformed - the way one is physically after a long swim, or mentally after snorkeling or diving. The surface dwellers depart in peevish black-and-white exhaustion, but the two friends emerge from the pool in full color. They take off their goggles and swim caps, revealing their open faces. "Pool" is similar thematically to gorgeous wordless fantasy stories like David Wiesner's Caldecott Medal-winning "Flotsam," Aaron Becker's Caldecott Honor-winning "Journey" or Barbara Lehman's Caldecott Honor-winning "The Red Book." It deserves a place among them. Lee's story opens the reader to miracles that can be uncovered in ordinary situations, both through the wonder of the imagination and the natural world. The wonder of friendship, too. EMILY JENKINS is the author of many books for children including, most recently, the picture book "A Fine Dessert."

Using an adorably chunky kawaii aesthetic that fans of her previous books will recognize, Wan (Sleepyheads) serves up a whale-size dilemma. A boy with dot eyes and a round head discovers that an enormous blue whale has taken up residence in (or rather on top of) his kiddie pool, making it look about the size of a teacup saucer. Wan's comedic sensibilities shine as the boy tries various methods to remove the whale, which maintains a state of unruffled serenity. The boy first counts to 10 ("...and when I'm done, you'd better be gone!"), then tries reasoning with it ("Wouldn't you rather swim with other whales?"). Bribing the whale doesn't work, nor does attempting to lift it out of the pool with a construction crane. All the while, the unmoving whale smiles pleasantly and spouts water out of its blowhole. A compromise lets everyone win, while a zinger ending suggests the boy's animal problems are only beginning. Wan's cuddly, candid world is the sort that readers will want to step into again and again. Ages 2-6. Agent: Teresa Kietlinski, Prospect Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.