Rough Day at Loon Lake

Sheila Martindale is poetry editor of Canadian Author and Bookman and
the author of No Greater Love.

Four animal friends—a turtle, a squirrel, a mouse, and a
salamander—are longing for ice cream on a hot summer day. But with no
money to buy the ice cream, they look for another way to cool off. They
soon find the perfect place. It has grass, sand, trees, and a pond to
swim in. But the perfect place is a golf course, and the friends find
themselves in some danger from hurtling balls. The golfers are four
imposing bears who start out by ordering the quartet off the course, but
then decide the youngsters can be useful. The bears offer to pay the
friends for each golf ball they can retrieve from the pond. Before long
the youngsters have earned some ice-cream money and cooled off from all
the swimming.

Though very young children will enjoy the story’s delightful animal
characters, it is not likely that they’d be familiar with the game of
golf. Nevertheless, Kathleen Waldron’s story has a certain charm, and
Dean Griffiths’s illustrations—particularly the big bears in golf
clothes—are quite funny. Readers who enjoyed Waldron and Griffiths’s
previous book featuring these characters, Loon Lake Fishing Derby, will
likely enjoy this sequel. Recommended.