Barnacle Bay
This simple, informational comic starts the story on the endpages, with a small pink crab tumbling into the ocean. It falls on a small 
larva, who introduces itself. The larva is looking for a home and the crab is ready to get out of the boring bay – but agrees to show the larva around first. They meet kelp, anemones, and more inhabitants of the bay and finally become friends as well as figuring out the larva’s identity.
The plot is a little weak —Crab never really explains why it wants to leave and the “story” is mostly just there as a placeholder to move the characters around the bay and meet different creatures. However, with a younger audience this is fine and it’s a nice way to introduce the different inhabitants, which is the real point of the book. The short chapters, filled with puns and silly jokes, are divided by longer explanations of the different sea creatures the two meet and sometimes by interludes of puns, like a series of thumbnails of seagulls (one is a “trian-gull).
Information is included both in the general story, as when the two meet a group of mussels who explain that they are sessile, or when a sea urchin, sea cucumber, and sea star start an argument about the relative merits of their digestive systems, and in informational sections, narrated by the crab, which give more detailed information about behavior and habits.
Curll’s art style is very cute, with lots of blues and greens, picked out with brighter pinks and oranges. A red-lipped clam waxes philosophical about being the measure of happiness, with dramatic changes in its cartoon eyes. Kelp strands, some wearing old-fashioned glasses, gossips about their gas bladders and pokes the feet of littering humans. Two groups of opposing anemones, one orange, one yellow, wave their tentacles and zap each other and everything passing by, leading to a blue page with the heading “Pardon the interruption. We are experiencing tentacle difficulties.”
The final end pages show the crab passing readers on to the next habitat exploration, a fern forest with their guide, Fern.
Curll has a fun, squiggly style that matches well with her pun-filled text. Young readers will enjoy exploring the underwater world with crab and larva, painlessly learning about the different underwater inhabitants, and giggling at the puns and wordplay. A strong choice for elementary school libraries and public libraries that serve this age group, with special interest for those located in the Pacific northwest.
Barnacle Bay
By Jana Curll
Greystone Books, 2025
ISBN: 9781778401022
NFNT Age Recommendation: Easy Readers (5-9)
