The Lantern of the Sea

A gentle, beautiful picture book for children missing a parent who is far away, at sea, on deployment, or wherever work has carried them.

The Lantern of the Sea is a story about love, duty, and the flame that does not go out.

A Lantern Keeper who feeds fire to the water so that wanderers might find home. A boy who learns to hold the light while his father is away. And a sea that keeps its promises.

When the storm comes and the lantern goes dark, the boy must find what he already knows: that light is born in the dark, and that love which serves the world never truly leaves it.

Told in poetic, unhurried prose, with illustrations of rare warmth by Si-Eun Jeong, The Lantern of the Sea gives children a way to move through a parent's absence without alarm, and without false comfort. It does not tell them not to feel the silence. It shows them what lives inside it.

For families where a parent goes to sea, to a rig, to a deployment, or to any work that calls them far and holds them there. For the child who stands at the door after it closes. And for the parent who carries that image all the way to the horizon.

A book for ages 4 to 8, and for anyone who has ever waited for someone to come home.

Vega Mare spent fifteen years at sea as a senior ship's officer, navigating the same distances this story describes. She knows what it is to leave, and what it costs the people who stay. The Lantern of the Sea is her first children's book, written for the children who wait, and for the parents who carry them in their hearts across open water.She writes under the Sea Lantern name from the south of Spain.