Sandra Steen

Reading this picture book put a smile across my face throughout the whole story. When I first saw this book in the store, I immediately know I had to buy it just because I loved the illustrations so much! Each illustration fills the entire page and appears in a “scrap book look” with pictures cut and pasted together, beads glued on, 3D stickers, and colored pencil drawings. In my favorite illustration, the “seaweed”, which is what the twins refer to the mop-like cleaners in the car wash, takes up three-fourths of the pages and appears to be turquoise pieces of felt glued onto a painted yellow pole. I had to touch the page just to make sure that this photo is not 3D. Next the language in this book is written similar to the style of a poem. The sentences are very short, and include tons of metaphors that relate the car wash to being under the sea. For example, the book says “What’s that? Giant arms. Octopus. Whomp! Thomp!” In this scene, the twins were describing the giant rag that moves the soap around on the car to be an octopus. With this example, you can see that there are not many complete sentences on that page. This type of writing appears to be the same way children speak when they are just beginning to learn how to talk, which makes this book very relatable to children. Overall, the plot of this story was very interesting with the way the authors made the car wash appear to be a submarine ride under the sea. I thought that this was very neat because children have very vivid imaginations just like that. The big idea of this story is for the readers to allow their imagination to wonder. As soon as I began reading, my imagination began to wonder as I pictured a carwash like being under the sea.… (altro)