Three Ladies Beside The Sea (New York Review Children's Collection) - Tapa dura

"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

"Three Ladies by the Sea consists 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

Wickedly funny and delightfully sad, Three Ladies Beside the Sea is a tale of love found, love lost, and love never-ending. Edward Gorey's off-kilter Edwardian maidens are the perfect accompaniment to Rhoda Levine's lilting rhymes.

The place is remote:
Three houses beside the sea.
The Characters are Few:
Laughing Edith of Ecstasy,
Edith so happy and gay.
Smiling Catherine of Compromise,
She smiles her life away.
And then there is Alice of Hazard,
A dangerous life leads she.
The question in the plot is quite simple:
Why is Alice up in a tree?
The answer can be discovered:
Edith and Catherine do.