View source for On the Beach: The Winter Visitor by Chris Green and Jenny Fionda

{{infobox1
|title=On the Beach: The Winter Visitor
|author=Chris Green and Jenny Fionda
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=For Sharing
|summary= A delightful story about two children who take a polar bear home.  Ticks all the right boxes and delivers an ecological message - but leaves you feeling that you've been amused and entertained.
|rating=5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=31
|publisher=Blossom Spring Publishing
|date=August 2023	
|isbn=
|cover=B0CC9W7GLR
|aznuk=B0CC9W7GLR
|aznus=B0CC9W7GLR
}}
Kit and Teal were just beginning to wonder whether it was better to be at home, bored but warm, or frozen cold and building sand sculptures on a snowy beach when a large slab of silvery ice drifted onto the shoreline.  On top of the ice was a polar bear.  As the ice bumped onto the sand, the bear woke and with wobbly legs moved from the ice.  Kit was all for making a run for it, but Teal knew that the bear was hungry and gave him one apple and then another.  He obviously needed to be taken home on the bus and given a good meal and somewhere to sleep.  What else would you do?

Now, I'm not going to tell you what happens next.  You can read the book and hear what happened in Chris Green's own words.  He does it so much better than I can.  What I am going to do, is tell you about the skill with which this has been done.  Adults reading the book with a child are going to smile (actually, I laughed out loud) at some of the situations such as the incongruity of the bear sitting between the children on the bus.  Children will laugh at the fantasy of it all, enjoying 'one being put over on the adults'.  What I really appreciated was that it was clear that you couldn't just take a wild animal into your property and think that all would be well.  Sometimes even Mum can't sort it out.  This time it's the prime minister (now who could it be that has a head of floppy hair?) who gets the bear back to where he belongs.

I liked that Kit and Teal aren't obviously male or female so the story is going to appeal to both girls and boys.  I ''know'' it ''shouldn't'' matter but we've all had boys tell us that they wouldn't read something because it was ''girly'' or girls thinking a book won't be for them because there's a boy on the cover.  Gender's irrelevant here - it's the story that matters.

There is an environmental message in the story but it's incidental and flows naturally from the situation.  Cooler baths aren't just necessary for your polar bear house guest - they could help the planet.  There are plenty of other discussions that can arise naturally from this delightful story. It's the type of book that I loved when my daughter was a child: subjects would come up and we'd go off on all sorts of tangents.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

As I read, I was put in mind of [[The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr]] which is a little dated now.  ''The Winter Visitor'' has many of the same elements but with a more relevant message for today's readers.

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{{toptentext|list=Top Ten Self-Published Books 2023}}

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[[Category:Chris Green]] [[Category:Jenny Fionda]]