Flotsam [Hardcover]

David Wiesner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2006 | Age Range: 4 - 8 years

A bright, science-minded boy goes to the beach equipped to collect and examine flotsam - anything floating that has been washed ashore. Bottles, lost toys, small objects of every description are among his usual finds. But there's no way he could have prepared for one particular discovery: a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera, with its own secrets to share ...and to keep.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description
A bright, science-minded boy goes to the beach equipped to collect and examine flotsam--anything floating that has been washed ashore. Bottles, lost toys, small objects of every description are among his usual finds. But there's no way he could have prepared for one particular discovery: a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera, with its own secrets to share . . . and to keep.

In each of his amazing picture books, David Wiesner has revealed the magical possibilities of some ordinary thing or happening--a frog on a lily pad, a trip to the Empire State Building, a well-known nursery tale. This time, a day at the beach is the springboard into a wildly imaginative exploration of the mysteries of the deep, and of the qualities that enable us to witness these wonders and delight in them.

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A Look Inside Flotsam
(Click on Images to Enlarge)

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From School Library Journal

Starred Review. Kindergarten-Grade 4–A wave deposits an old-fashioned contraption at the feet of an inquisitive young beachcomber. Its a Melville underwater camera, and the excited boy quickly develops the film he finds inside. The photos are amazing: a windup fish, with intricate gears and screwed-on panels, appears in a school with its living counterparts; a fully inflated puffer, outfitted as a hot-air balloon, sails above the water; miniature green aliens kowtow to dour-faced sea horses; and more. The last print depicts a girl, holding a photo of a boy, and so on. As the images become smaller, the protagonist views them through his magnifying glass and then his microscope. The chain of children continues back through time, ending with a sepia image of a turn-of-the-20th-century boy waving from a beach. After photographing himself holding the print, the youngster tosses the camera back into the ocean, where it makes its way to its next recipient. This wordless books vivid watercolor paintings have a crisp realism that anchors the elements of fantasy. Shifting perspectives, from close-ups to landscape views, and a layout incorporating broad spreads and boxed sequences, add drama and motion to the storytelling and echo the photographic theme. Filled with inventive details and delightful twists, each snapshot is a tale waiting to be told. Pair this visual adventure with Wiesners other works, Chris Van Allsburgs titles, or Barbara Lehmans The Red Book (Houghton, 2004) for a mind-bending journey of imagination.–Joy Fleishhacker, School Library Journal
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Product Details

• Age Range: 4 - 8 years
  
• Hardcover: 40 pages
• Publisher: Clarion Books (September 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618194576
• ISBN-13: 978-0618194575
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 0.5 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (137 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,180 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > Children's Books > Animals > Marine Life
  • #24 in Books > Children's Books > Science, Nature & How It Works > Nature

More About the Author

David Wiesner is one of the best-loved and most highly acclaimed picture book creators in the world. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have won numerous awards in the United States and abroad. Three of the picture books he both wrote and illustrated became instant classics when they won the prestigious Caldecott Medal: Tuesday in 1992, The Three Pigs in 2002, and Flotsam in 2007, making him only the second person in the award's long history to have won three times. He has also received two Caldecott Honors, for Free Fall and Sector 7.

Wiesner grew up in suburban New Jersey, known to his classmates as "the kid who could draw." He went on to become a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was able to commit himself to the full-time study of art and to explore further his passion for visual storytelling. He soon discovered that picture books were the perfect vehicle for his work.

Wiesner generally spends several years creating each new book. Many versions are sketched and revised until the story line flows smoothly and each image works the way he wants it to. He creates three-dimensional models of objects he can't observe in real life, such as flying pigs and lizards standing upright, to add authenticity to his drawings.

David Wiesner lives with his family outside Philadelphia.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

147 of 161 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Full fathom five thy father lies September 3, 2006

By E. R. Bird HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

I suppose that there must be some people in world for whom the name "David Wiesner" means nothing. I can't fathom what this kind of an existence must be like. I suppose it would be the literary equivalent of not knowing what chocolate was. Or snow. The minute the new Wiesner book comes out I, like hundreds of thousands of others like me, rush out to purchase it for friends, relatives, and passing acquaintances I met once in the grocery store. Little wonder that the man has won two Caldecott Medals AND two Caldecott Honors. Now one of those numbers is about to change since Wiesner has produced his most ambitious creation to date. Wordless (as always) and more intense than his light-hearted "Tuesday" and "Sector 7" ever were, this is a book overflowing in deep-water mysteries and delights.

A scientifically minded young man is closely examining the various critters and crabs he finds washed up along the beachshore when he's suddenly doused in a wave. When he emerges he's sitting on the sand with an old-fashioned camera beside him. On its front are the words, "Melville underwater camera". Intrigued, the boy plucks out the film and takes it to a one hour photo store. The pictures he get back, however, are nothing a person could imagine. Mechanical fish swimming with real ones, hot-air pufferfish, entire civilizations living on the backs of gigantic starfish... and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The last photo, however, is the most interesting of them all. In it, a girl holds a picture of a boy holding a picture of a boy, holding a picture of a girl, and so on. Our boy gets out his magnifying glass and sees even more pictures of kids holding pictures of kids. And when he gets out his microscope he can see all the way back to the very first picture in the batch ever taken. When last we see of our hero he has taken a picture of himself holding the last photo with the Melville camera. Then he tosses it into the sea, where we see it acting out a couple of adventures until the last picture in the book. A girl on a tropical beach reaches for the camera, half-buried in the sand.

That was less of a summary and more a retelling of the entire book, I know. I have a hard time with encapsulation when I find myself so deeply in love with a picture book. And now I'm having a very hard time figuring out what to coo over first. Let's talk details. Wiesner may well be the king of them. Some people see his work as a colorful version of Chris Van Allsburg. I can see where these people are coming from, but Van Allsburg is far more interested in tone and mood than in meticulously researched, thought through details. Consider what Wiesner has accomplished with, "Flotsam". First of all, there isn't a single thing that happens in this book that feels out of place or out of the blue. For example, at the end of this story our hero takes a picture of himself with the picture of the multiple kids. So where did he get the film? Well, if you track back to when he was getting the film developed, you see him purchasing some 120 color film (which is Kodak yellow, though Wiesner's too classy to put in any product placement). Another remarkable detail? Look at all the pictures of the children. As they go back in time their hair and clothing styles change accordingly. You can see that the child from the 1980s is holding a picture of a child from the 1970s. Then, after a while, we're in the 50s, the 40s, the 30s, and finally we're at the turn of the century. The film is black and white by this point, but when you consider what kind of camera we're dealing with that makes perfect sense. Wiesner even beveled the edges of the 1950s picture.

So that's the realistic part of the book (so to speak). The crazy underwater stuff is interesting in an entirely different way. Who thinks up gigantic starfish with islands on their heads? Or tiny aliens vacationing alongside some somewhat weirded-out seahorses? It's here that Wiesner really lets himself go all out. Kids who've read his previous books may also enjoy seeing his collection of flotsam items on the title pages. The black and white pig may also look especially familiar to them...

Great story. Great illustrations. Great great book. If the storytelling style (almost comic-like in its use of panels and divisions) doesn't get you then the outright well-thought out wonderfulness of it all will. An amazing addition to any collection. Your kids will never look at the sea the same way again.

49 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous Wiesner October 30, 2006

By Doug - Haydn Fan VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

David Wiesner's fans will be tickled pink with his latest book. Flotsam takes for its setting the Jersey seaside and the author's memories of his trips to the beach as a young boy. (The back flap of the dust jacket has a color photo of Wiesner as a five year old looking perfectly suited to slip right into his book!) Painted quite appropriately in watercolors, and utilizing a horizontal format, with pages wider than they are tall, the book perfectly captures the reflection of light at the seaside while framing the spacious broad strech of blue waterline against the long strip of sandy beach. Opening with a long shot of a young boy digging at the tideline with his bucket we turn the page to find ourselves staring face-to-face with an enormous hermit crab! Looking again we realize the crab is not sitting on beach sand but the boy's upturned palm, while an enormous eye - the boy's eye seen through a magnifying glass - gazes down behind the upturned twitching two eyes of the crab. Then things jump back to regular size on the next page but only for a moment as Wiesner constantly shifts the size and format of each step of his silent story. Like the boy we are meant to look carefully and from every possible angle. The title marvelously conveys the narrative method as mysterious snapshots flit back and forth with a young boy's curiousity of what lies out beyond the waves. Mr. Wiesner achieves almost a perfect storyboard, deftly mixing and merging images of varying sizes with his now unequalled mastery of visual storytelling, the sum producing an utterly delightful experience. Large sea turtles, their backs bedecked with villages of shell grottos sail through the water with the same wonderful stillness as the magical pigs in Tuesday. The becharmed juxtaposition of imagination and reality is reinforced in the name of the old-fashioned box camera washed ashore: Melville. And like Melville's epic Moby Dick factual data coexists side by side with the wildest fancies. Here whales can appear as a single enormous eye - the theme of the book is looking and how we record impressions - or as small guppies swimming below gargantuan walking starfish the size of tropical islands. Scale and perspective are handled with Wiesner's virtuoso touch; there is never any sense of heaviness or display for its own sake. His colors have never been richer or more brilliantly managed - the rich hues of a scene with small aliens as underwater tourists is quite the equal of William Joyce's palette. Somehow even the ebb and flow of the waves comes across in this brilliantly achieved work.
Combining the child's eye and imagination of Sector 7 with the dizzying draughtmanship and narrative gamemanship of The Three Pigs, Flotsam finds Wiesner the most brilliant Children's Book illustrator currently active. Despite all the gushing about Van Allsburg in the official notes it's now clear that these days Wiesner is working on a more exalted level of artistry.
P.S. Do take off your dustjacket for a surprise!

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars the infinite pleasure of having a child 'read' you a story January 24, 2007

By Jesse Kornbluth TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

The little one is presently holding steady at age "four-and-a-half-and-three-quarters-but-in-my-head-I'm-seven." And boy, is she ready to read.

We're delighted. And we want to encourage her. (Which does not extend to teaching her how to read; we are old, our reservoir of patience is not what it once was, it's better to let the experts at her high-priced school do the job.) So we get her the picture books of David Wiesner and ask her to tell us their stories.

Wiesner is the acknowledged master of wordless books for kids. (All three of the Wiesner books we own --- Tuesday, Three Pigs and Flotsam, his most recent book --- have won the Caldecott Medal.) It's not just that he draws beautifully and that his pictures allow a child aged 4 through 7 to tell the story. His greater gift is his refusal to talk down. His books are challenging. They are invitations to consider the story later, to broaden a child's sense of the world --- or, more accurately, they reflect the ability of most children to dream big and think poetically.

"Flotsam," for example, takes us to the beach. A well-equipped boy --- he's got a magnifying glass, binoculars and a microscope --- is digging and exploring while his parents read. He's so fascinated by a crab he doesn't see a rogue wave rolling in; when it rolls out, there's an ancient box camera at his feet. He shows it to friends, who are predictably puzzled. (Film inside? What, no digital chip?) And he takes the film to be developed at a one-hour photo shop.

Back at the beach, the boy looks at the pictures. One is of fish --- but some of the fish have gears. In another, sea creatures sit on lounge chairs in an underwater living room. A puffer becomes a hot air balloon. A village of shells travels on the back of a turtle. Aliens have a party on an underwater terrace. Giant starfish walk in the shallows.

And then there is the picture of a Japanese girl. She's holding a picture of another kid, who's holding a picture of another kid, who's holding....The magnifying glass isn't powerful enough; this is a job for the microscope.

And now, as we look deeper into the pictures, we are moving back into time. The decades fly by --- we end in the late 19th century, looking at a boy on the beach. Which gives our inquisitive lad an idea: He'll take a self-portrait using this old camera.

As soon as he snaps the shutter, he's hit by another wave. The photos scatter. The boy thinks for a moment, then throws the camera into the water. We see it float in the moonlight. Get pulled by a squid. Become a carriage for sea horses. Fly in the bill of a pelican. Float on an iceberg. And, at last, wash up on a beach.

A little girl, sitting on the beach, sees the camera. She reaches for it....

That's only half the story. The lesser half, really. The much larger part begins with your kid saying, "I want to read that book." And then, in her little voice, she tells you a story.