Hard not to give a book with such emotional clout five stars. I am moved to tears - not just metaphorical ones - by this story of bereavement and revival. A little girl loses an older male companion with whom she shared a vibrant curiosity about the world - a dad, a granddad- and with him goes her sense of awe and wonder. Her heart she puts in a glass bottle which she has round her neck.
Much later she meets a little girl as curious about the world as she had been...

Visually this is some of Jeffers’ best work: the recurrent nearly empty beach is seen in all sorts of colours and moods; the girl growing up is subtly depicted, with her heart locked away; when she tries to take her heart out of the bottle, tired of its emotional weight, there is both tragedy and comedy. It takes the small child to give the protagonist back the heart she shut up in the bottle and restore a sense of wonder - and how that is shown on the penultimate page I found genuinely moving.