L.M. Boston’s books are, without fail, a delight. I like how they don’t condescend, how, though they’re written for children, they use sentences with lots of commas and nested thoughts. Most of all, perhaps, I like how full of sensory detail they are: how light on water looks, how a stone feels in your hand. The Sea Egg is the story of two brothers on holiday at the seaside in Cornwall, and of the strange stone a fisherman finds: but it’s as much about the sea, and summer, and holidays as it is about the plot and how it unfolds. Take this passage:
It’s impossible to resist the invitation of the sea as it spreads a curtsy in a semicircle of blue silk toward you, frilled with babbling foam that nibbles at your feet in the sand. Impossible to forget the first taste of blown salt on your lips as a translucent hollow wave as wide as the cove rises up before you and, beginning at the far end, turns over its shrilling waterfall mane in one continuous movement all along the line till it breaks over your shoulders where you stand and completes its perfect curl beyond, and now behind you. Once you are in it, the sea will never stop its challenge, pummeling with surf, jostling with crossed waves, tackling with the full weight of its spring, blinding with its wet white hair, pulling your legs from under you. It is, thought Toby, standing up, breathless, to await the next wave, the very stuff tritons are made of and itself a measureless living thing. (p 58)
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