Once Upon a Harbour

'Once Upon a Harbour' is a collection of six stories of various lengths written in verse. There are wandering trees, a house adrift, curious pigs who outwit a wolf and mice and pirates. All these tales are illustrated in a minimal colour palette with soft hues of green, yellow, blue or pink.

There is rich vocabulary, but some is advanced so as to fit the rhyming pattern and would require explanation for many younger readers, words like pinnacle, foray, meticulous, bluster and, consternation are great words to unpack while bore, predation, askance are a little more obscure. I also think some of the puns used would be lost on a younger audience. I feel this book would need support to be appreciated and would work as a classroom read aloud.