MY FATHER IS IN THE NAVY

A popular novelist (The Hero and the Crown, 1985 Newbery Award) makes her picture-book debut with a perceptive glimpse of an experience that has the autobiographical feel of Yolen's All the Secrets of the World (1991). Sara, the small narrator, is constantly aware of her father's existence—she looks at his picture, hears her mother read his letters, tells her friends about him. But she doesn't remember him, and when his ship finally sails in, she's filled with reserve—until he picks her up and her arms go around his neck: "And then I remembered my father." In soft color-pencil art, Gourbault depicts an appealingly orderly world at a generalized time not too long ago, imparting energy with perspectives skewed Zelinsky-style and showing the relationship between parents and child with unusual tenderness. An attractive vignette. (Picture book. 3-7)