LIGHTHOUSE SEEDS, by Pamela Love, illustrated by Linda Warner, Down East Books, Camden, 2004, hardcover, 33 pages, $15.95.

A CUB EXPLORES, by Pamela Love, illustrated by Shannon Sycks, Down East Books, Camden, 2003, hardcover, 29 pages, $15.95.

Maine has a special mystique that draws many types of people to its woods and shores, and offers fertile ground for authors, especially for those who write children’s books.

Author Pamela Love chose two classic Maine subjects – living at a lighthouse and black bears – for her books “Lighthouse Seeds” and “A Cub Explores.”

The illustrations in both children’s books are magnificent.

In “Lighthouse Seeds,” based on a true story about Mount Desert Rock lighthouse around the turn of the 2oth century, Linda Warner uses soft colors and simplicity to convey the story line and the characters’ moods. The backgrounds of the illustrations are sprinkled with enough details to make the reader feel at home and anticipate each page with relish.

With her artistic gift, “A Cub Explorers” illustrator Shannon Sycks makes a bear cub and its mother come alive in the story based on facts about black bears. The detail in each illustration showing a typical day in a cub’s life is incredible and can be appreciated even by an untrained eye. Accurately portrayed, the bears’ natural surroundings, including other woods and water creatures, and the animals’ physical features could provide numerous topics of discussion for an adult and child who are reading the book together. The book also includes a page of common questions and answers about black bears.

The same praise cannot be applied to these two children’s books’ words. The lighthouse story is held together loosely around its theme of a young girl trying to establish a garden for her mother on the stark rockbound island where their lighthouse home perches. Transitions between ideas are practically non-existent, and the reader needs the illustrations to learn the depth of what is happening in each scene. At one point, the change is so abrupt from one page to the next, the reader could think a page is missing.

Some of the text, especially in “A Cub Explores,” reads as if it is written just for that illustration, not for the continuity of the story. A reader could wonder whether the publisher allowed the books to go to print without the final word editing that is necessary for good story flow.

As an editor and as a reader, I found both of these books very disappointing. The subjects are marvelous. The themes are genuine. The book title for the lighthouse story is clever and interesting. The illustrations are world class. The writing is not polished.

Down East has a good reputation, but neither of these books lives up to the standards a reader expects from this well-known publisher.

Julie Murchison Harris can be reached at 990-8285 and jharris@bangordailynews.net.