Shipwreck Saturday (A Little Bill Book for Beginning Readers)

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Summary: Little Bill builds a sailboat but then it breaks
Review: The "Little Boy Books for Beginning Readers" are written by Bill Cosby to play up the value of friendships and family relationships while also encouraging children to solve the problems they face in fair and creative ways. Each book is dedicated to Cosby's son Ennis, who was tragically murdered, which adds poignancy to these stories for older readers. For beginning readers it is the validity of the point being made in these stories, that are set in a fairly realistic world, that will matter. These books, which are illustrated by Varnette P. Honeywood, are intended for ages 6-10, which shows that beyond being for beginning readers they are intended to teach important lessons.

In "Shipwreck Saturday" Little Bill has been working very hard on a sailboat, which he has named "The Moby Dick." His big plans for Saturday are to take his boat to the park so he can sail. However, first his friends all make fun of his boat and then when he sails it something happens and it ends up breaking. Little Bill is so upset and so afraid that his friends will see what happened and make fun of him that he not only runs home without his boat, he leaves both his lunch and his brother behind.

Cosby, of course, is one of America's most beloved comedians, whose humor has always come out best in the stories that he tells about his own childhood (remember "To Russell, My Brother, With Whom I Slept"?) and raising his own kids (remember the routine from his concert film that he turned into the pilot for "The Cosby Show"?), and he does the same thing here. At the park Little Bell sees Kiku and her grandmother doing some origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. Of course, as if often the case with such stories, Kiku and her grandmother are going to help Little Bill's spirits soar in the wake of his boating disaster as young readers again see how creativity can transform a painful experience.

As child psychiatry specialist Dr. Alvin Poussaint points out in his letter to parents at the start of the book, there is another important aspect to the story of "Shipwreck Saturday" in that it speaks to the days of yore, when children actually made some of their own toys either by building models from kits or by using their imagination on materials found around the house (I remember making our G.I. Joes into Knights of the Crusade using paper towel tubes, tinfoil, cloth from an old pillowcase, and a red marker). Poussaint makes a good argument for the value of children building homemade toys, even if from a kit. As Poussaint points out, we would be surprised if Little Bill was as upset about what happened to his boat if it had just been something he picked up at the toy store and even beginning readers should react to the idea that there would be something special about such a toy.