Hope the Whale is one of the most loved exhibits at the Natural History Museum. Have you seen her? We will be going to visit her again soon and the children are so excited to see her again now that we know more of her story. Hope is a blue whale and it is thought that she did have a baby in the last year of her life. This is a magical imagining of what Hope’s life may have been like based on what we know about her and her awe inspiring species.
A young boy tells his tale of seeing a whale and her baby far out at sea. He called the baby Hope. The boy watched the sea from the land until the pair were out of sight. All summer long the boy dreams and draws imagining icebergs and polar bears, gannets and krill. In the autumn he sees Hope and her mother again heading for the warmer waters of the south. All through the Irish winter the boy dreams of Hope until he sees her again in the spring tides.
Each year as the seasons come and go, the boy waits and watches, watches and waits to catch a glimpse of the beautiful whale, at first with her mother and then alone.
But then one spring, Hope did not come. The boy despairs and feels lost. The whale has been an anchor for him for so long. Was Hope lost? The boy imagines terrible things happening to Hope. His heart is hurting. His Hope is gone. But then, one beautiful day the boy sees two whales in the ocean. Hope! Hope and her baby! The boy watches his heart healed and filled with Hope and happiness.
This is such a lovely story. The illustrations by Laura Chamberlain are absolutely stunning. The bond between the boy and the whale is beautifully portrayed. This is a wonderful way to introduce migration to children and to begin looking at whales and other ocean creatures. At the end of the story there is a large foldout page packed with facts about the real Hope the Whale, the extraordinary journey whales make each year and why they do, baby whales, whale song, baleen feeding and what we can do to help protect this magnificent species and the oceans they live in. We absolutely love this book and it was the perfect bedtime story for World Whale Day.
Ending World Whale Day with Hope
And some of her very beautiful friends and family