Summer is here in full force, so it seems like time to discuss Jack Wong’s 2023 picture book When You Can Swim.
When You Can Swim is a promise and a love letter, a love letter to kids and swimming. The entire book is built around describing what the narrator will do with a kid once they learn to swim. The narrator promises the ocean, then describes swimming-based adventures that seem more lake-like (dragonflies buzzing by), or river-based (talk of upstream currents carrying things).
The adventures happen on the beach, on the dock, when jumping, diving, and underwater, and the images change accordingly. In some kids run along the beach, trailing footprints and sand pipers across two pages. In others, they dive deep, and readers will need to turn the page to follow them into the depths, away from the light. Water shows up as splashes, ripples, bubbled masses, and waves.
And through it all, like a lifeline, stretches the narrator’s love and the promise of adventure.
Jack Wong remembers what it was like to be a kid, and knows what love and trust mean to kids.
This would work well with Our Pool, or, on a more solemn day, Our Lake.
