Flotsam Hardcover – Picture Book, September 4, 2006

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!

I've purchased and gifted this book over a dozen times. I usually gift it to toddlers but adults have told me how much they enjoy it as well. The book is based on the wonderful idea of a sort of magical, traveling camera that reveals fantastical, secret, under-the-ocean tableaus. The camera is found by a succession of lucky children spanning time and locale. The children enjoy the treasure of discovery then return the camera to the sea where it can be found and enjoyed by others. There are no prose to the book so you can narrate the pictures as you like.

David Wiesner is the Stephen King of illustrated children's books: off-kilter, weird, and supernatural. However, Wiesner underlies all he draws with humor, joy, spunk. He has won the Caldecott Gold Medal three times, forTuesday,The Three Pigs,and "Flotsam."This is what is written on the front book flap: "Flotsam: Something that floats. If it floats in the ocean, it may wash up on the beach, where someone may find it and be astonished, and share the discovery with someone else--as David Wiesner shares it with you." And that, my friends, pretty well summarizes "Flotsam" as far as story line goes. However, to appreciate Wiesner's storytelling talent through art, you must "read" the book.First page after the end paper and before the title page is a distinctive picture of a boy beachcombing. The double title page shows findings from a beachcombing expedition. The next page begins the story with a close-up of a hermit crab in front of a huge eyeball belonging to the boy. He's looking, looking, and a huge wave sweeps him over. When it washes back out, there sits a camera with seaweed and tiny barnacles all over it. It's a Melville Underwater Camera.He finds a roll of film in it and takes it to the one-hour photo shop on the beach. What he sees when the film is developed astonishes not only the boy but the viewer as well. It is a picture of phantasmogorical figures of the sea. But the most astonishing is the one of a girl holding a photograph of a boy holding a photograph of a girl holding a photo...He gets a magnifying glass and sees more figures and photos. He gets a microscope and sees more and more and more until it is just a boy in 19th century garb waving to the camera.He takes a photo of himself holding the photograph he had developed and then tosses the camera back into the sea. At the end another little girl finds the camera...Children LOVE the bizarre elements of the story. It tickles their fancy and stimulates their imagination. This is a must book for every child, kindergarten age and up, including mothers and fathers. I have my own copy, as well as Wiesner's other two Caldecott winners. They are a joy to "read."

I love this book by David Wiesner! The whole story is told in pictures & it's such a great tale. The artwork is phenomenal, really. Shipping was smooth & fast from this seller & item arrived in perfect condition.

This is a wonderful book, with no words. It has a fairly complicated story line, but it is told in lovely pictures, not text. It is great for pre-readers, early readers, lazy readers. Spend time on each page, carefully looking at the illustrations. Have your child predict what is going to happen. Have your child tell you the story in their own words. Write down what they say and then read it back to them the next time you look at the book. So many "reading" skills to practice, without the frustration of decoding the text!

This is a wordless book. So it can be used to get kids to write their own text. This is a nice stepping stone to writing their own stories. This book is full of imagination and wonder. Everyone in our family enjoyed it. It was a cross between scifi, fantasy, and 20,000 leagues under the sea. My son is particularly interested in aliens - so if yours is too check out the other books from this author titled Mr. Wuffles and June 29, 1999