"We chose The Water Boy from our library because the pictures are gorgeous. They're like individual watercolor paintings.

It's a book about a little boy who is first intrigued when a teacher says, "We are all made of water," and then is scared of water and then ends up having this magical friendship with water, this relationship with water. It can do — he's sort of able to teach it to do tricks, and he has powers over water that most children don't have. In the end it's got a very sort of green, environmental message, but not like in a dogmatic way. It's very subtle.

I think my three year-old is probably fixating on the magical aspect; you know, the boy could get the water to spell his name in the air or get it to stop a waterfall to save a dog's life. My five year-old is kind of intrigued by the child fixing grownup problems where he's able to clear up a polluted stream at one point, and the ocean sending him a thank you letter in a bottle at the end. Things like that appeal to the different ages.

It teaches children to be sensitive to the environment, to care about it but not in this really boring way like, "We have to recycle! We have to clean up after ourself!" It's a very sort of personal relationship the boy develops with the ocean, with the river, and I think that speaks more to young children. They care about things they know. I'll finish it — it's only like 12 or 15 pages — I'll finish it, and my three year-old will be like, "Again! Again!" I would give The Water Boy by David McPhail five stars, and especially with this being almost Earth Week, you know, this April."

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