Three Ladies Beside the Sea (New York Review Children's Collection)
"A rhymed story of charming eccentricity, Rhoda Levine's Three Ladies Beside the Sea has a fable-like quality. Three friends — Edith of Ecstasy, Catherine of Compromise and Alice of Hazard — live in harmony, doing their chores, drinking tea and playing chamber music. (Once you've seen Edward Gorey's pictures of their elongated figures and their odd, tower-shaped cottages, it's impossible to imagine them otherwise.) Alice has a disturbing habit of climbing a tree — in all weather! — and gazing intently out at the sky. It's a compulsion, she explains when her friends confront her about it...Ah, then why does she do it? There's the question, to which Levine and Gorey's answer seems to be: One has to accept all kinds of mysteries in friends." --Los Angeles Times"Ms. Levine's wry imagination and Mr. Gorey's powerfully epicene drawings (figure  that one out) constitute a whole new country for a child to visit or for a lucky  grandfather to act as tour guide. ...This is, of course, a must for the many Edward  Gorey fans of all ages, and a chance to discover the fine poetry of Rhoda Levine.  I read this one to my five year old grand-daughter because it is just long enough  to be engaging and just short enough to be wiggle proof, and just wise enough to  set a young imagination free as a bird." –Sherman Yellen, The Huffington Post “Three  Ladies by the Seaconsists of more nonsense about the formal activities of the three  ladies of nobility with the exception of Alice who insists upon in a tree where she  seeks a bird she saw long ago.” —Charlotte Jackson,Los Angeles Times