Moody illustrations in a marine palette will compel readers attention in this rhyming story set in 19th-century Cape Cod, about the year a girl spends without her father. Using rhyming couplets, Lendroths (Why Explore? ) narrator imagines her fathers progress as he sails to China on a trading mission: I dream of silks in every hue/ and willowware of deepest blue. She measures the passage of time in the growth of her baby brother and in the changing of seasons, and she also suffers. A December storm prompts fears that somewhere in a howling gale/ my father battles sleet and hail. In Alléns American picture book debut, he channels the soft-edged realism and absorption with light shared by 19th-century American painters to create an atmosphere of foreboding. Muted gray-greens and dusky blues dominate; even the summer sky is cloudy. Children in the contemporary equivalent of the narrators situationa son or daughter anxious about an absent parents well-beingwill appreciate both the distance afforded by the period setting and the comfort of the melodic language and happy ending. Ages 57.