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For children, summer is a glorious time, a vision of endless, sunny days filled without any schoolwork. Several new children's books capture this summer feeling in words and pictures:
* An island sits forlorn and seemingly forgotten amid gray winter skies. Several months later, however, the island comes alive again with the sounds of people at play.
In "Island Summer" (Lothrop, $16), author/artist Catherine Stock combines memories of her childhood with a more recent trip to a Greek island to create a delightful ode to a summer place.
The book opens by showing the lonely island whipped by a winter wind, and then - page by page - Stock fills the story with sights and sounds of summer.
Her description of summer's pleasures will ring true with every child: "It's summertime at last, and everyone has burst out of school and work and winter. Oh, how nice to throw on cotton shirts and baggy pants and pad around on bare brown feet and in flappy flip-flop sandals."
Stock's writing is matched by her watercolors, which capture the moods of a summer day in color and motion. (Ages 4-7)
* The lyrics are familiar to most Ameri cans, but artist Mike Wimmer imparts new meaning to them in "Summertime" (Simon & Schuster, $16.95).
Wimmer's chosen medium is oil painting, and he knows just how to use his palette and canvas to convey emotion. In "Summertime," the illustrations glow with the colors of a hot country summer as Wimmer focuses on the rich emotional life of an African-American sharecropper family.
The family is obviously just eking out a living in the cottonfields, yet there's a wealth of love and life in Wimmer's illustrations. There's also so much realism in the illustrations that young readers might even be...