Beachcombing: David Wiesner's Flotsam

In the bleak midwinter, it's a treat to open David Wiesner's Caldecott Award book, Flotsam and bathe in his watercolor beach scenes, executed first is soft pastels and then in brilliant underwater brights.

The wordless picture book begins with a blond boy intently studying a crab under his magnifying glass. Swamped by a wave, the seaweed-draped boy notices an underwater camera half sunk in the sand. When he develops the film inside, the prints show fantastic underwater fauna--a windup fish, an octopus seated in a cozy underwater chair, alien beings exploring the deep sea world--and a photograph of an Asian girl, holding a photo of a Lapp boy, holding a photo of another boy holding a photo of another boy and on and on.

Putting to use his magnifying glass and then his microscope at progressively increased power, the boy follows the image sequence back through decades to an early twentieth-century boy waving, with no photo in his hands. It's clear that there is only one thing to do: the boy photographs himself holding the photo and tosses the camera back into the ocean, where it drifts until it washes up at the feet of another child.

Although this is a wordless picture book, it's not really aimed at the very young. Flotsam is at its best tantalizing kids between seven and ten with its hint of infinity and the timeless mystery of the sea.

For Wiesner's other Caldecott books, see Tuesday, The Three Pigs, Sector 7, and Free Fall.