Book review of When You Can Swim by Jack Wong

In When You Can Swim, readers discover the fun of swimming in varied our bodies of water—oceans, ponds, lakes, rivers and extra—in a textual content set primarily in conditional statements (the “when you can swim” of the title), as spoken by a guardian to a toddler. This phrase is a chorus that conveys the considerable potentialities and delights of transferring within the water: the “clinking / of waves passing in and out / of a million pebbles,” the ripples on a pond, the whitecaps on a river, “the smoke on the lake” and rather more. 

In Jack Wong’s breathtaking watery landscapes, robust currents surge beneath “rushing waterfalls,” and daylight shimmers on ocean waves and the floor of a river. Text and illustrations merge seamlessly to light up the methods through which swimming animates all of the senses, and Wong writes with beguiling lyricism and figurative language: “When you can swim, / you’ll reach landscapes as foreign as the moon / no spaceship required / except the craters are squishy and filled with reeds / ready to swallow loose sandals / but like good explorers, we’ll leave only footprints.”

Wong’s playful views are fascinating. In one unfold, from the attitude of mendacity on our backs within the water, we see “treetops drift by” and a dragonfly buzz close to. In one other, we flip the e book for a surprising vertically oriented picture of two ladies who dive down after breaking the floor of a lake. A wealthy apricot-colored mild adorns the highest of the unfold with darkness under, and Wong describes “tannin-soaked lakes / pitch dark from tree bark / like oversteeped tea.” The e book’s ending options the identical little one within the e book’s opening, able to take swimming classes at a public pool. 

An appended word from Wong, putting in its tenderness, explains his hesitancy as “an immigrant kid” in Canada to swim at public swimming pools and his want to inform a narrative with “differently colored characters” as a result of “representation is power”—some extent he makes incisively and superbly on this splendid image e book.