The Sociable Sand Witch

What if the witch you found wasn't scary at all, but desperately wanted to chat? Junior Jenks is digging on the beach, avoiding the ocean his family swims in, when the sand suddenly erupts and the most surprisingly friendly witch in literary history pops into view. She's not interested in hexes or mischief. She wants to know about Junior's day, his fears, his inner life. She wants to show him something. And so begins a descent into a magical underworld beneath the waves, where clams skip rope and starfish shoot across luminous caverns, where the Sand Witch's children welcome a nervous boy into their strange, tender world. Written in 1923, this is undersea fantasy before Pixar, before Studio Ghibli, before the genre had its templates. It's a book about a child learning that the thing he feared might be the place where he finally belongs. Gentle, odd, and quietly radical in its kindness.