Flotsam

Written and Illustrated by David Wiesner

Clarion Books, 2000

Awards: Caldecott Medal

The plot in a nutshell:  A boy finds a camera washed up on the beach

A blond boy playing at the beach is knocked over by a wave and when it recedes, he sees an old camera left behind on the shore. Its label claims it is a Melville underwater camera. He takes the film inside to be developed and is amazed by the pictures, which show clockwork fish, octopi living like people, tiny creatures living in conical shells on the backs of sea turtles, aliens and giant starfish. The last picture shows a girl holding a photo of a boy holding a photo of a girl in a picture that seems to go on forever. The blond boy examines it closer with his magnifying glass and microscope and sees that the pictures go way back in time, to what appears to be the early 1900s. He takes a photo of himself holding the picture and throws the camera back out to sea. Squids and seahorses pull it deeper into the ocean, past a city of mermaids. A seagull picks it up and flies it out to the edge of a distant shore, where a little girl finds it.

This fascinating book brought author/illustrator David Wiesner his third Caldecott Medal. In keeping with his typical style, the story is told entirely through pictures and features an element of the fantastic. I loved this book and read it several times through, finding something new in the pictures every time. When the book was published, Mr. Wiesner set up a contest in which cameras travelled between bookstores, with each bookstore taking pictures designed to see the world in a new way. What a cool way to promote not only the book, but the whole idea of the magic of photography presented within the book.

Giant sea turtles with little people living in shells on their backs. Okay, I’m cool with that.

The watercolor illustrations are gorgeous and full of color and detail that draw you into the story. When the camera’s photos get developed, we see them as full page illustrations and the first one, with just that one fish with exposed clockwork, is so unusual and unexpected. I love Mr. Wiesner’s decision to pull back the perspective at that moment and show us the boy looking at the pictures again, to both clarify what’s going on and give us a chance to draw our breath and think about what we’re seeing, before continuing on with the extraordinary images. The picture of the girl holding the photo is an incredible story within the story here that is really lovely to think about. This book is just wonderful.

And what did we learn?  What I take away from this book is that the most amazing stories have room for lots of characters and you should never pass up the chance to become part of one.