In Seeing and Believing, a little girl living on the shores of one of the Great Lakes in 1910 longs for her father’s return from sea. Novelist and picture book writer Eliza Clark’s powerful story celebrates the imagination of her young protagonist, who fills the days and weeks of her father’s absence with a vivid fantasy life. She builds a sandcastle and pictures the princess who inhabits it; she sees stars reflecting on the lake and dreams they are the lights of her father’s ship. After describing each daydream, she asserts that not being able to see something
doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, because “the most wonderful things take more than your eyes to see.” The book ends with the long-awaited father-daughter reunion.

Clark’s simple, repetitive text effectively conveys the girl’s – and her mother’s – anxiety about her father’s absence. He seems to be the only source of meaningful structure in her life, since her mother’s presence is definitely overshadowed by the father. Readers will find the book’s flow bogs down with the refrain; deleting one of the repetitions or occasionally incorporating it into the rest of the text would have made the story more dramatic and less pedantic.

Krykorka, who collaborated with Clark on Butterflies and Bottlecaps and on several books with Michael Kusugak, styles her paintings perfectly in tune with Clark’s text. Her endpapers blur the real and imaginary, with the little girl seeming to merge with the waves’ froth, and this fantasy feeling continues throughout. Though some of the drawings are uneven in quality, her art, with its passionate blues, enchanting creatures, and sense of animation, makes Seeing and Believing succeed as a story that will appeal to children aged four to eight.