I really didn’t know what to expect from What Fish Are Saying: Strange Sounds in the Ocean, a 2025 picture book written by Kirsten Pendreigh and illustrated by Katie Melrose. The question was so unexpected and the cover so colorful I was essentially musing and saying, “Hmm. Haven’t got a clue.”
However, the acknowledgments before the story started thanks both Scripps and NOAA, letting us know the author had consulted serious authorities in the field.
Once the story opens, the images were open and inviting; the first page shows an aerial view of two humans in a red kayak, and the second a closer view of a seagull. The rhyme surprised me. The pattern shifts at times, as do the rhythm and line length, but we get rhyming couplets (pages 1 and 2), a rhyming quatrain (page 3), and looser, more visual forms of verse as we move through. The book uses lots of vivid sound words (grate, moan, etc.), then moves on to loosely translating sea sounds and explaining how different creatures make their sounds (squeezing swim bladders, for example) and what the different sounds are for (warning, for example). The images are all vivid, and often full to overfull with creatures and sounds. There’s a lot to read aloud with kids, a lot for them to point out, and a fair amount of information about aquatic creatures and sound.
