Customer Reviews

Flotsam

5 star:		(97)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!

Flotsam is a wordless picture book, with detailed illustrations that reward close examination. A young boy is at the beach with his parents, with no other kids to play with. He entertains himself by examining crabs with his magnifying glass. Venturing too close to the water, he's toppled by a large wave. In its wake, the wave leaves a boxy, old-fashioned, underwater camera. As any right-minded child would do, he takes the film from the camera to a one-hour photo store, and also replaces it with a new roll of film. Returning to the beach, he examines the photos, and finds documentation of a fantastic underwater world filled with surprises.

The illustrations of the underwater world are different in tone from the illustrations of the boy on the beach. The beachside pages have an old-fashioned look about them, and are fairly sparse. They are frequently framed as a series of smaller pictures set on the same larger page. The scene where the boy is waiting for the one-hour photo captures perfectly his impatience, through a series of small images.

The underwater photos are more colorful, more whimsical, and very detailed. The boy finds photos of mechanical fish, octopuses who sit in armchairs and read to their children, tiny underwater aliens wearing bubble helmets, gigantic starfish with islands on their backs, and giant turtles bearing shell cities. Some of the details will make the reader laugh aloud, like the underwater fishbowl, with fish casually swimming in and out, the blowfish as open-air balloon, the electric eels working as light bulbs, and the spotted fish wearing a collar around its non-neck, with the name-tag Spot.

The last picture that the boy finds is of a girl, who is holding a picture of a boy, who in turn is holding a picture of a girl, and so on. Turning to his trusty microscope, the boy finds that this nesting of photos continues through several levels. Going back far enough, the pictures start to be in black and white, then in sepia, the clothing old fashioned. It's a perfect chain of all of the people who have found the camera.

Realizing what he has to do, the boy takes his own picture, while holding the photo of the girl holding a photo. Then he tosses the camera back into the ocean, where it embarks on another journey, this time with the reader traveling along. In the end, we see the camera swept up onto another beach, where a lonely girl is waiting.

It's amazing what David Wiesner is able to accomplish in this book without any words at all. We see the boy's curiosity and wonder. We follow all of his movements as he finds the camera, shows it to his parents, and checks with the lifeguard to make sure no one has reported it missing. We see vignettes of a hidden underwater world, one that any child would like to imagine really exists. And we see the camera transported by a series of sea creatures, to end up in the lap of another child.

I think that what makes this book work so well is the juxtaposition of the realistic beach scenes with the whimsical deep sea snapshots. The idea of a hidden world just out of view captures the imagination. The chain of photos going back in time gives the story depth, with the child as part of a larger cycle of people, and the camera a constant as time passes. I highly recommend this book for older pre-schoolers and early elementary school children.

This book review was originally published on my blog, Jen Robinson's Book Page, on January 27, 2007. Flotsam recently won the 2007 Caldecott award.

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.

This book is really a treasure. It will make you and your kids think about the ocean, the past, the future, photography, optics, conservation, and the list goes on! Believe it or not, it isn't really for the very young even though there are no words. The ideas the pictures are trying to convey are fairly complex. Even toddlers who can read would benefit from an adult explaining what is going on and how the story is progressing. Still, babies might enjoy just looking at some of the beautiful art. I think you will love "reading" it to your children.

In the case of a book crafted by David Wiesner, the answer to he old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, is certainly a resounding yes! In the 40 pages this book consists of, it would take at least 300 written pages to tell the same story. In brief, a yound lad finds a strange, old and fascinating camera that has been washed up on the beach. The young boy opens the camera and takes the film found their to be developed. Here the real story begins. The photographs reveal a wonderful world which apparently came out of Mr. Wiesner's head, through his fingers, and into his wonderful, realistic watercolor paintings. This is a world filled with strange mechanical creatures, strange real creatures and even stranger underseas civilizations. Through the use of one of the photographs, in which the artists paints a picture, within a picute, within a picture, many, many times over, we go back through time, from one child, somewhere in the world, to another, to yet even another part of the world. Each painting in this book (an remember, there are absolutely NO WORDS), is finely interlocked with the preceding painting and that painting that follows.
The art work, as with all Wiesner's work, is flawless (probably not to the artist himself as no artist is ever completely satisified), but they are certainly flawless to us, the reader. The paintings are accomplished in a realistic mode, smooth, well executed and as to color, blended well. This is a book of discovery and I do hope you and your child will discover it soon. You will certainly be far richer for it. Recommend this one highly.

As An Elementary School Librarian, I was amazed with the pictures in this book. A story is told through a series of events with only pictures. The pictures are very detailed and wonderful, It really lets the reader use his or her imagination, and it is a great book to share with readers of all ages.

I bought this book for my son's first grade teacher. The class loved exploring the pictures and anticipating the story. Although this book does not have words, it offers the opportunity to challenge kids to tell the story by identifying expressions and clues into what is happening as the pictures progress as well as getting them to ask the questions. It is a wonderfully imaginative book and shows that books have value beyond the written word even for early readers.

Flotsam is a wonderful book. The images are beautifully drawn but that is not the reason for
my excitement. This book allows children as well as adults to become storytellers. Best of all
the story can change with each reading. The three year old in our house has already changed the
his readings at least once if not twice. It holds his interest and mine too.

This wordless book offers a complex, imaginative look at what one can find while exploring the beach. Popular with my younger library patrons who want books that "won a prize," the book would also be a great stimulus for writing with upper elementary or even middle school students (I used to teach 7th and 8th grade language arts, so yes, I'm sure). Also check out Weisner's previous Caldecott winner The Three Pigs. I love to read that one out loud because they way Weisner has the pigs step out of the story really blows kids' minds! Flotsam will appeal to readers of ANY age.