A Fine Orange Bucket will captivate kids

Charlotte Crowder’s new children’s book, A Fine Orange Bucket, published by North Country Press, features a lobsterman whose orange bucket is washed into the sea and lost. It’s a great story that every child will enjoy. Jill Finson’s colorful drawings are very special too.

About a year after it’s lost, the bucket is discovered by a young girl whose family is enjoying a sail along Maine’s Coast. The girl rescues the bucket from shore where it’s been stuck in the rocks, but their father eventually tosses it back into the ocean and it is swept out to sea, where, miraculously, the lobsterman finds and rescues it.

I’m looking forward to reading this book to my two granddaughters, Ada, age 5, and Esme, age 2 ½. At the end of June, we enjoyed five days with them on Campobello Island just off of Lubec. We stayed in a house right on the edge of the ocean and the girls were excited to see whales and seals from the deck of the house.

They also enjoyed watching the lobster boats going back and forth checking all the traps. And I am sure, after I read them this book, that on our next visit to Campobello, they’ll be looking for that orange bucket!

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.