Flotsam

Flotsam is a wonderful story that is told entirely with pictures! The story starts with a young boy at the beach who finds a camera. After trying to find the camera's owner the boy has the film in the camera developed. The pictures on the roll of film are fantastical images of magical underwater worlds. There are mermaids, mechanical red snappers, and octopuses in a living room. Towards the end of the roll of film there is a picture of another child holding a picture. The boy gets out his microscope too look closer at the picture and realizes that in each child is holding a picture of another child. Through the children's dress and the style of photograph you can see that this camera has been around since about the 1920's or 30's. Then you realize that each child has taken a picture of themselves holding the picture of the other children, then thrown the camera back into the water where the sea creatures take amazing pictures for other children to find. 


I thought this story was very beautiful. I feel like the lack of words helps the story to transcend age, language, and time so that anyone who appreciates beautiful illustrations would love this book.  One thing that I felt like could limit the story's life is that the camera uses film. This is crucial to the story, however it is a technology that is becoming obsolete, so children in the future may have a hard time realizing what is going on.


An idea for a library program that incorporates Flotsam could be a photography program. It would work especially well if it was a two part program, maybe during a summer reading program. Each child could be giving a disposable camera to take pictures of things that they feel are beautiful. They should be instructed to try and take pictures that will tell a story, like in Flotsam. Then after the pictures are developed they can use the pictures they took and arrange them in a scrap book to tell a story. 


PROFESSIONAL REVIEW FROM ONEMINUTEBOOKREVIEWS.WORDPRESS.COM

By Janice Harayda

David Wiesner won the 2007 Caldecott Medal today for an eloquent, wordless picture book that encourages children to find the magic in everyday life. Flotsam tells the story of a boy who finds an underwater camera that washes up on a beach at the New Jersey shore, where the artist spent summers as a child. (The book doesn’t name the location but shows a beach tag reading “LBI” that, along with other visual references, situates the story clearly on Long Beach Island.) Wiesner’s young hero rushes to have the film developed and finds that it reveals a fantasy world of remarkable images, beautifully rendered in lush watercolors — a red wind-up fish, an undersea flying saucer full of miniature aliens, a starfish carrying a mountain Atlas-like on its back. The boy also sees photos of children from other countries and times, including one that appears to show the Jersey shore at the turn-of-the-century (a tribute to the artist’s great-grandparents?).

After taking a photo of himself, Wiesner’s hero throws the camera back into the ocean, where it takes another fantastic journey before being found on the last page by a young girl in a tropical realm where nobody needs a beach tag. As in his wordless picture book Tuesday, Wiesner invites children (and their elders) to make up their stories to go with his images. And he provides material rich enough to captivate a variety of ages. Toddlers and younger preschoolers may enjoy simply looking at the vibrant images and pointing to creatures they recognize while adults fill in the story. Older preschoolers and young school-age children may want to make up their own tales to explain, for example, how an octopus came to be sitting on underwater armchair. (They get help from clues such as an overturned “Moving and Storage” van also resting on the bottom of the sea.) Throughout Flotsam, shifting perspectives encourage children to see the world from many angles and, above all, to find the extraordinary in ordinary life.

Wiesner, D. (2006). Flotsam . New York: Clarion Books.