Castles in the Sea: All About Icebergs

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Writers and artists form a superb partnership in this easy-to-read but
far-from-simplistic book about one of the world’s great wonders. For
years, Lawrence Jackson reflected his fascination with the natural world
by writing on science and nature for adults. Castles in the Sea is his
first book for children. The book is technically clear, yet also
gripping and imaginative.

Jackson lived near the sea in Newfoundland and Labrador for 27 years.
He died in 1998, and his wife and children have worked to find both
illustrator and publisher. Diana Dabinett is a full-time visual artist,
one inspired, like Jackson, by the natural environment. Born in
Zimbabwe, Africa, she now lives in Shoe Cove, Newfoundland. In Castles
in the Sea, her watercolor paintings on silk are truly exceptional. They
bring the icebergs’ strange and surreal shapes into our minds and
imaginations in a way that few photographs could do.

Travelers come every spring to see the icebergs drifting southward. In
clear and intimate terms, Jackson describes how glaciers (slow-moving
rivers of ice) reach the ocean, then “calve” to produce icebergs:
“Sometimes they look like huge white castles, with blue lights
gleaming inside.” As for the air released when a piece of iceberg
melts, he calls it “the cleanest air in the world, air just freed from
bubbles that may be 40,000 years old.” Good writing, for all ages.
Highly recommended.