THE PRINCESS AND THE CASTLE

A young child gets over her fear of the water and her fear of the new man in her mother’s life in this detached import. Ever since her fisherman father went to sea and never came back, Genevieve has feared the ocean, but she reacts with out-and-out terror when her mother introduces a big, bearded new friend. Binch depicts the seaside setting and the human figures in her simply told tale with lapidary precision, but her chilly photorealism lacks both intimacy and intensity. Genevieve loses her fear of the gentle giant between one page and the next; by the end, she has even accepted his invitation to sail out for a family picnic to the abandoned castle in the bay that had been the setting for her pretend princess adventures. It’s a common situation, certainly—but readers may be drawn more strongly into such warmer, more developed episodes as Mavis Jukes’s Like Jake and Me (1984), illustrated by Lloyd Bloom, or Cari Best’s Getting Used To Harry (1996), illustrated by Diane Palmisciano. (Picture book. 6-8)