A couple of years ago, Brian Floca was on an island off the coast of Maine when a storm rolled in.
"There was this kind of electric charge in the air," he remembers. It was hypnotic — "Just the sensory feeling of the storm coming. The wind, the waves, all of these elemental forces unloading themselves on the island." But also the feeling of — "Is this safe? Should I really be doing this?"
That memory stuck with Floca — and inspired him. His new children's book, Island Storm, is about two kids who feel a storm coming, pull on their boots and head to the sea. As the waves crash and the rain starts to fall harder and harder, they ask each other, "Is this enough? Or do we try for more?" Of course, this being a story about kids and their escapades, they decide to go on. Past boarded-up houses, past a neighbor heading home, through the rain and an empty town, the siblings go on.
"It's a little bit about this urge that we all have sometimes in life as adults and as kids, to touch the hot stove," says Floca.
Brian Floca is an author and an illustrator — a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator. "The funny thing that was happening for me, with this story, was that the drawings I was seeing myself make just didn't quite feel like the drawings that I thought the story wanted," he explains. So he called in reinforcements in the form of illustrator Sydney Smith.
"There are so many illustrators working today whose work I admire," Floca explains. "But I don't think there's anyone out there right now who handles paint and light and water and weather the way Sydney does and with the depth of feeling that Sydney does."
And the story "immediately appealed to the type of kid I was," Smith says. The kind of kid — and adult, if he's honest — who would always go out into a storm. But he admits he doesn't really know exactly how he illustrated this book.
"The actual ingredients, I can't even remember," Smith laughs. "I have a very messy studio with paints of all kinds just strewn about." It was like alchemy, he says, or playing. It's a mix of watercolor here, a little gouache there, some gum arabic and acrylic ink. "You introduce the different elements together and you watch it all kind of magically have a mind of its own," Smith says. It was an exercise in letting go of control.
However he did it, the illustrations have drama and emotion — they can even be a little bit scary. Smith says he wanted to communicate "that feeling of genuine fear that you get when you're in the presence of something so formidable," like a summer storm.
Island Storm is a book about risk and risk-taking, says author Brian Floca. Though, he laughs, the goal is not to encourage kids to go storm-chasing. It's to encourage them to be kids.
"I think about childhood a lot in the sense that it's a lot of discovering the line by crossing it," adds illustrator Sydney Smith. "I like to think that this book acknowledges this is what childhood is about — going too far and going back and discovering it on your own. You're allowed that freedom."
And in the end, it's also a book about safety. The siblings are there for each other, their mom is waiting for them at home, the storm will pass and the skies will clear.
Interior from 'Island Storm' by Brian Floca, illustrated by Sydney Smith. Text copyright © 2025 by Brian Floca. Illustrations copyright © 2025 by Sydney Smith. Used with permission from Holiday House Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
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