Member Reviews

Absolutely adorable, engaging and imaginative story that is so relatable. Beautiful illustrations! Who wants summer vacation to end....no one. These children use their imagination to problem solve. Love it!

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This book is a poem in pictures. You can’t help but hear the sea, feel sand in your toes and dream of summer vacation. Beautifully illustrated with inviting text.

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This was a great book about imagination. I really enjoyed the pictures and the pops of color.
I received an Arc of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Beautifully written and illustrated story of a last day of a beach vacation. What would you grow with grains of sand?
Littles will love this book. Especially would make a fine gift for those getting ready to leave their beach vacations!

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What a lovely book. Gorgeous drawings relay the return from vacation with sadness, but imaginative hope for a return to vacation next year.

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I cannot lie, once in a while a book comes along that just fits perfectly into your heart and this one did that for me. The illustrations are so endearing and you just want to hug the little characters and take them home with you.

When two wee children return home from their summer beach vacation their minds travel back to the great times they had there. While dumping the accumulated sand from her sandal big sister daydreams of all the fun they had at the beach. Then she gets a brilliant idea. What will happen if she and her sweet little brother Ulysses plant the sand she poured out of her shoe? What might grow? With great anticipation she tosses the precious sand into the wind and it scatters all across the garden bed.

Their imaginations ignite and they envision copious beach umbrellas that wave hello to the sun, a forest of pinwheels to fill the sails of a boat, and a giant crop of lemon-flavoured ice cream cones cropping up, just to name a few. How delightful!!!

The illustrations are brilliantly simple - black and white with smatterings of golden yellow and periwinkle blue that make them extremely unique and very eye-catching. The siblings have a tender-hearted relationship towards each other. A loving, caring father appears at dusk to scoop his little dreamers up in his arms and carries them off to bed. This book was translated from French by Karen Li and will be available April 15, 2018. It is highly, highly recommended by Storywraps.

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Arc COPY...beautiful pencil sketch illustrations with splashes of colour highlighting certain important objects. Very much a parable on summer memories, preserving those memories on the sad last day of summer (the memories seem to convey via sand grains) and the anticipation of going to the beach again next summer.

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Grains of Sand is a short and sweet story of a boy and girl who bring sand home from the beach in their shoes, and then wonder what would happen if they planted it. If grains of sand were seeds, what kinds of things would they grow into if you threw them in your garden? Ice cream? Pinwheels?

It is fun to watch children's imagination at work (and inspire the imagination of those reading), and the simple illustrations are appealing -- black-and-white images with splashes of blue and yellow here and there.

(Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.)

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A cute book about feeling sad after coming home from a vacation. The two siblings imagine what the sand that they planted could grow up into. I really love the simple illustration style with just yellow and blue, I think it highlights the beach story and makes it striking. Overall a cute book.

Thank you to netgalley for providing me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

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A short, cute story about imagination. Two children return from the beach and are very sad. When they find sand in shoes, they decide they will plant it and see what grows. Of course it is all beach and vacation related items. The illustrations are black and white except for blue and yellow. This actually accentuates the beach items which could be used as a discussion tool with children. It could also be a fun bedtime story based upon the ending. A good addition to a family library.

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This is a cute enough book, children missing the beach and dreaming about going there again.

I like how the girl finds some sand in her shoes and thinks she can plant it to make memories of the beach grow, and wonderful memories they are, beach umbrellas, and beach huts, and such.

But I have a slight problem with it. It is that these children are so very young, probably three or four years old, and the father says they will not go to the beach again for another whole year.

That is a lifetime away for a child. Will they even remember what the beach was like? Perhaps in France they can only go to the beach once a year. From the story it sounds as though they spent their whole vacation there. Perhaps the dad can only stand to do that once a year. (Which in France, would be an entire month).

The pictures are lovely, and the idea is lovely, but I feel so sorry for those kids, to not see the beach again for a whole year.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

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I cannot praise Grains of Sand enough. The illustrations alone are splendid and engaging for the age range, the story itself short yet enchanting. I can see this becoming a nightly read in many households.

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