Module 2: Flotsam

Book Summary: This book is a wordless picture book about a little boy who finds this camera one day while playing on the beach. The camera looks very dated and the little boy takes the camera to have the film developed. Once he sees the pictures he notices that they are pictures of other children holding up another picture by the ocean with the camera.  The pictures seem todate all the way back to the early twentieth century.  He then realizes that it is chain reaction adn takes a picture of himself with the camera and throws it back into the ocean.

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

Impression: I thought this book was awesome!!!! When I first looked through it I was confused on what was going on, until I got towards the end.  At that point, I went back to the beginning of the book and really started to enjoy the book.  It is like a fun game or mystery that you have to figure out using only pictures.  In the end it is a fun way to capture history and to keep the legacy of this old camera going.

The use of  bright colors gives you the mood of relaxed and carefree.  This is the feeling you wouuld have if you were on a beach in the sun.  The illustrator/author does a fantastic job of providing detailed lines and shapes when he is showcasing the sea animals underwater. You get a sense of actually being below the water with the darker yet vibrant colors of the ocean.

I would recommend this book to ages 4 and up only because it could be used in so many different facets.  This is just not a picture book but a piece of art!

Professional Reviews:

From Booklist
PreS-Gr. 2. As in his Caldecott Medal Book Tuesday (1991), Wiesner offers another exceptional, wordless picture book that finds wild magic in quiet, everyday settings. At the seaside, a boy holds a magnifying glass up to a flailing hermit crab; binoculars and a microscope lay nearby. The array of lenses signals the shifting viewpoints to come, and in the following panels, the boy discovers an old-fashioned camera, film intact. A trip to the photo store produces astonishing pictures: an octopus in an armchair holding story hour in a deep-sea parlor; tiny, green alien tourists peering at sea horses. There are portraits of children around the world and through the ages, each child holding another child's photo. After snapping his own image, the boy returns the camera to the sea, where it's carried on a journey to another child. Children may initially puzzle, along with the boy, over the mechanics of the camera and the connections between the photographed portraits. When closely observed, however, the masterful watercolors and ingeniously layered perspectives create a clear narrative, and viewers will eagerly fill in the story's wordless spaces with their own imagined story lines. Like Chris Van Allsburg's books and Wiesner's previous works, this visual wonder invites us to rethink how and what we see, out in the world and in our mind's eye.Gillian EngbergCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Kirkus ReviewFrom 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)

References:
Fleishhacker, J. (n.d.). [Review of the book Flotsam, by D. Weisner]. Booklist. Retrieved from http://www.booklistonline.com/Flotsam-David-Wiesner/pid=1709229

Kirkus Review. (2006). [Review of the book Flotsam, by D. Weisner]. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-wiesner/flotsam/

Library Uses: This book would be great for the unit of inferencing for all grade levels.  The picture allow you to predict what could happen next.

I would also recommend this book as connecting curriculum by using thisbook as a display for Art Apprectiation Month.  This book could be used to make up your own story by using the pictures from the book.