Flotsam

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
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In this extraordinary Caldecott Medal winner and New York Times bestseller by David Wiesner, a beach day is the springboard to a wildly imaginative exploration of fantastical mysteries of the deep--and of human connections through time.

A young boy comes to the beach eager to collect and examine flotsam--anything floating that has been washed ashore. But nothing among his usual finds compares with the discovery of a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera with its own secrets to share...and to keep.

Meet unexpected underseas denizens and enter fascinating worlds within worlds in this entrancing celebration of imagination, creativity, and the impulse to share that which delights and amazes us.

A beautiful picture book by a master of the form, David Wiesner, who has been awarded the Caldecott Medal three times and the Caldecott Honor twice.

Reviews (2)

Horn Book Review

(Primary) With its careful array of beachcombed items, the title page spread of Wiesner's latest picture book makes it look like one of those Eyewitness books, but the following wordless story is far stranger than fact. In clue- and fancy-strewn full-page paintings and panels, a boy at the beach closely examines items and animals washed in from the sea; when a wave deposits an old camera on the shore, his viewing takes a radical shift. He gets the camera's film developed at a nearby shop, allowing Wiesner's bountiful imagination great play in the series of photos the boy then examines: a robot fish, an octopus reading aloud to its offspring, giant starfish with islands on their backs. And: a seaside photo of a girl holding a seaside photo of a boy, holding a seaside photo of another child, ad infinitum. The inquisitive boy's ready magnifying glass and microscope allow him to see further and further into the photo, and further back in time, as revealed by the increasingly old-fashioned clothes worn by the children pictured. What to do but add himself to the sequence? The meticulous and rich detail of Wiesner's watercolors makes the fantasy involving and convincing; children who enjoyed scoping out Banyai's Zoom books and Lehman's The Red Book will keep a keen eye on this book about a picture of a picture of a picture of a.... (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

From arguably the most inventive and cerebral visual storyteller in children's literature, comes a wordless invitation to drift with the tide, with the story, with your eyes, with your imagination. A boy at the beach picks up a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera. He develops the film, which produces, first, pictures of a surreal undersea world filled with extraordinary details (i.e., giant starfish bestride the sea carrying mountainous islands on their backs), and then a portrait of a girl holding a picture of a boy holding a picture of another boy . . . and so on . . . and on. Finally, the boy needs a microscope to reveal portraits of children going back in time to a sepia portrait of a turn-of-the-century lad in knickers. The boy adds his own self-portrait to the others, casts the camera back into the waves, and it is carried by a sea creature back to its fantastic depths to be returned as flotsam for another child to find. In Wiesner's much-honored style, the paintings are cinematic, coolly restrained and deliberate, beguiling in their sibylline images and limned with symbolic allusions. An invitation not to be resisted. (Picture book. 6-11) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Reviews (2)

Horn Book Review

Kirkus Review