THE DISAPPEARING ISLAND
by Corinne Demas

Illustrated by Ted Lewin Published by Simon & Schuster May, 2000 How to Get This Book Behind the Scenes Reviews In the News

A "Top 40" selection of Yankee Magazine Selected by the Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College of Education (starred ) “Best Children’s Books for the Year”  (2001 edition) Honor Book Massachusetts Book Award 2001 Included in the 2006-2008 traveling exhibition This is Our Land: Discovering America and the World through Original Illustrations from Children’s Books

Can an island disappear?

For my ninth birthday my grandma gave me a small box. Inside was a perfect sand dollar and a note. The note said:

To celebrate your birthday we will voyage out to the disappearing island where I found this sand dollar when I was just your age.

"How can an island disappear?" I asked. Grandma laughed.
"When I take you out to Billingsgate Island, Carrie, you'll see," she said.

Carrie and her grandmother journey out to Billingsgate Island by boat the next day. There were no buildings, no trees, not even a blade of grass. Just sand. The sand was all in long ripples made by the waves as the tide had gone out. As they explore the island, Carrie finds clues to the past: a brick from a chimney, a piece of the old lighthouse. Her grandmother's stories help her imagine what it was like there a hundred years ago. When the tide starts coming in, Carrie discovers not only the mystery of Billingsgate Island, but the power of nature, itself.

Although The Disappearing Island is fiction, Billingsgate Island is a real place off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. During the 1800s it was a prosperous fishing community, now it's nothing more than a sandbar that appears only at low tide.
An Author's Note at the end of the book tells you more about its history.

How to Get This book: 1. Ask for it at your local library. If they don't have it, they may be able to get it for you from another library. 2. Buy it at your local bookstore. If they don't have it in stock, they can always order it for you. 3. Order it on-line.

Behind the Scenes

The Disappearing Island was a project that took many years to complete. I was first inspired to write about Billingsgate Island when I discovered it with my family in the summer of 1994. I did background research at the Wellfleet Historical Society and the archives of the Cape Cod National Seashore. I knew that Ted Lewin, who had illustrated my book Matthew's Meadow, was the perfect illustrator for my story.	Billingsgate Light, circa 1900 photo by Henry K. Cummings
photo in the Wellfleet newspaper, the Advocate	A year later, Ted came out to Cape Cod to work on The Disappearing Island with me. His wife Betsy acted out the part of the grandmother in the story, my daughter acted out the part of Carrie, and Ted photographed the scenes. We all traveled out to Billingsgate Island in a boat like the one in the book. Ted took hundreds of slides, and later used them when he worked on his watercolor illustrations. He used old photographs of the island for the part of the story that takes place a century ago.
What's the difference between Ted's realistic watercolors and his photographs of the same scene? When you compare the two, you can see how much Ted changes to illustrate and enhance aspects of the story. In his paintings, he's able to rearrange elements, focus on details, and convey emotions that the camera never sees. The watercolors capture what it's really like to be on Billingsgate Island better than any photograph can.

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About the Illustrator

Ted Lewin grew up in Buffalo, New York. He always knew he wanted to be an illustrator, and as a child copied the work of artists he admired, including Winslow Homer. He financed his studies at Pratt Institute of Art as a professional wrestler. Ted has illustrated more than a hundred books including Matthew's Meadow. His many awards include a Caldecott Honor. Ted and his wife Betsy, also an illustrator, live in Brooklyn, New York with their two cats, Slick and Chopper, but they travel all over the world to work on children's books. Gorilla Walk is a collaboration based on their expedition to the mountain gorillas in Uganda. To learn more about Ted, check out his autobiographical book I Was a Teenage Wrestler as well as Touch and Go: Travels of a Children's Book Illustrator. Visit Ted Lewin's website at www.tedlewin.com.

Reviews

         Stories of islands that have disappeared beneath the sea have long exerted a powerful hold over the human imagination. This beautifully told and illustrated story hints at some of the reasons why this may be so.  On Carrie's ninth birthday, her grandmother gives  her a small box containing a perfect sand dollar and a note promising to take her to Billingsgate Island. . . Grandma steers the motorboat out to the island, where the two picnic and explore, finding artifacts of the flourishing community that once inhabited the island. Carrie closes her eyes and imagines how life might have been here long ago, in a sequence of pictures depicted in warm apricot earth tones that contrast with the coolness of the sea. There is a sense of the inexorable procession of time and the relentless power of the sea, stayed only in part by the transmission of stories and memories from one generation to another. ‘What I love about a place like this,' says Grandma, ‘is that it reminds us that nature still can have its way once in a while.' Lewin's watercolors are luminous. The predominance of blue and the long lines of the horizon unify the pages, making this book lovely to look at as well as to read.

-- Kirkus Reviews

Demas invests her finely etched blend of realism and fantasy with supple imagery—a “strange rusty creature that looked like the backbone of a whale” turns out to be a metal spiral staircase from a defunct lighthouse; the tide claims the edge of the beach”  Working in his customary watercolors, Lewin (previously paired with Demas for Matthew’s Meadow) conjures land- and seascapes bathed in dazzling summer light.  From the vigor of the board ride to Carrie’s waking dream, rendered in beachy pale orange wash that gives it visual distinction, Lewin is wholly in control of his medium.

-- Publishers Weekly

Although science teachers will want to integrate this tale into a unit on tides and erosion, this portrayal of a loving, vibrant, muscular (and, blessedly, not condescendingly portrayed as cute or feisty) grandmother, who knows how to keep her reminisces brief and to the point, could also be a prime selection for Grandparents Day celebrations.

-- The Bulletin of Children’s Literature

Treasure this book when all the world’s news seems to be about disappearing forests or wetlands or farms, for this is a tale of nature’s power to reclaim and make invisible our temporary stamps upon it.  . . The girl’s present is not only the trip but what her grandmother’s tales help her to imagine, what life was once like there.  Ted Lewin uses an unusual orange-washed background for the scenes of the past.  Few contemporary watercolorists can work the sparkling sun on the ocean as well as Lewin, and all the varieties of blue and sand are amazing.

-- The Chicago Tribune

Although readers will be fascinated by the story of Billingsgate Island, it is the loving relationship between Carrie and her grandmother that gives emotional depth to The Disappearing Island. The relationship is highlighted in the spectacular watercolor illustrations by Lewin.

-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the News

"Ducklings, Islands, and Barns That Talk: The 40 Classic New England Children's Books," by Kristen Laine, Yankee, December, 2000

“‘Disappearing Island’ set on Billingsgate,” by Elsa Allen, Provincetown Banner,  July 13, 2000.

“Local lore retold as child’s tale,” by Michael Lee, The Cape Codder, Day & Night , July 12, 2000.

“Cape Cod Journal” interview by Bob Seay, WOMR-FM, Provincetown, July 7, 2000.

“Here and Now” WBUR , Boston’s NPR News Station Interview with host Robin Young, Monday, June 26^th.  (A tape of the show available from WBUR, or listen to the complete show online.

“Sojourns, wild water & spunky females:  Cape Cod is setting for new books by Corinne Demas”  by Bonnie Wells,  Amherst Bulletin, June 2, 2000.