Lucy Ruth Cummins’s 2023 picture book Our Pool is a blast–and it seems appropriate to read it now, as summer heats up.
Our Pool is a bright, well-structured book: it opens with a two-page spread of an enormous sun rising over buildings, and closes with images of a huge moon lighting those same buildings in an indigo night.
The pages in between follow the narrator and her family through one hot day in the city. They join other families walking, biking, and perhaps bussing and cabbing to the city pool. Once there, they go through the rituals of preparation; changing, putting on sunblock, and then testing the water.
Then the family and everyone else is in the pool, enjoying what it feels like and how it changes the feel, sound, and look of this summer day in the city. Multiple generations are there, as are people of many ethnic backgrounds, all united by their shared experience in the pool (and shared need to escape the heat). Many are also united by a visit to the ice cream truck on the way home.
The sheer size of some images really fits with the energy of summer and childhood: there’s a triangular spray of sunblock that cuts across two pages.
