Sebastian Squid: Lost!

Chicoan-turned-Oaklander Casey Fay is a talented artist (and a pea pod, if you believe the bio on his website, Faydirgle.com). His artistic obsession with creating very cute drawings of cephalopods resulted in a self-published 2008 book called Wonders of the Sea: Cephalopods. Recently, Fay added another cephalopod-centric book to his bibliography: the delightful Sebastian Squid: Lost!, the first in his fledgling Determine Your Own Destiny series. Aimed at kids, Sebastian Squid transforms the reader into a squid—Sebastian—who goes on an adventure that has the possibility of seven different outcomes, depending on choices the reader makes throughout the course of reading this wonderfully illustrated page-turner. Fay includes scientific information (black holes, decapods) as well as nutritional and environmental information (a plastic bag “after one use has one of two probable fates: Either sit in a landfill for a million years or end up as part of a gigantic plastic mass in the ocean”) in such an entertaining way that young readers will almost certainly get his timely, constructive messages. Fay’s book is so appealing that one can easily forgive a couple of misspellings (“suprisingly” instead of “surprisingly,” for one), though, for the sake of kid readers, one hopes that they will be corrected in a second edition.