Naturalist Margaret Carney and award-winning Ontario illustrator Janet Wilson make fishing the focus of their take on the popular picture-book theme of a young girl learning to appreciate nature while spending idyllic days with her grandfather. Told in the voice of the girl herself, the story conveys a deeply felt enjoyment of the fishing she does when visiting Grandpa’s farm – jigging for catfish in the pond in summer, ice-fishing for lake trout in the winter. The gift of her own spinning rod enables her to practise and develop her skill in casting, and her reward is a trip with Grandpa to a lake where they can fish for bass.

The excitement of the catch comes across here for even a non-fisher, but Carney also emphasizes the pleasures that come from simply being outdoors in a natural environment. The narrator and her grandfather notice the osprey, heron, kingfisher, and loons on the lake, and Wilson adds a baby loon riding on its parent’s back in the accompanying picture. Wilson’s rich watercolours enrich the book’s appeal: the characters and their feelings are expressively evoked, and the natural background – stones, trees, rippling or splashing water – has a vivid life of its own.

As well as celebrating the joys of fishing, this story is implicitly concerned with the child’s development of independence and an environmental conscience. Carney doesn’t preach, but as Grandpa puts back a bass he’s just caught, he comments, “If everyone kept all the fish they hooked, there’d be nothing left but little ones.” Eventually when the narrator catches “the biggest fish in the lake,” she is able to appreciate not only her own achievement in landing it, but the magnificence of the fish itself, and lets it go free.