WILL ABBY SEE WHALES TODAY?

A young girl longs to see whales on her birthday in Klein’s rhyming picture book.

Abby is thrilled when her father says he’ll be taking her whale watching for her birthday. “Will we see whales?” she wonders in a repeated refrain. She knows that she may only see a few fins, and the foggy weather makes her wonder if she’ll be able to see anything at all. Soon, Abby, her dad, the boat captain, and three older students voyage out to sea. When one student spots a whole group of whales, the fun begins: “One, two, three fins we saw. / Four, five, six galore.” The captain lowers a microphone into the water, and Abby believes the whales are singing her a birthday song. Klein offers Abby’s first-person perspective, weaving in notes about endangered species and human pollution. The scansion is sometimes uneven, and a few lines lack rhymes. However, the overall readability of the text and educational material at the end make it well suited for classrooms. Weber’s full-color illustrations have a painterly feel, with linework that evokes mixed-media compositions. The characters’ faces, which have a range of skin tones, have an almost photographic quality, but the real stars are the realistic whales, especially in a beautiful two-page spread set underwater.

An often engaging and informative tale with a conservationist message.