"Flotsam" by David Wiesner

If you have yet to become acquainted with this wonderful book of pictures, I urge you to find a copy and share it with the next child you meet.  It is an open door to the imagination all children are eager to find.  They just need an adult to point the way. 

I believe what initially caught my eye, as there are far too many picture books for a soul to pay even scant attention to each one, was the title.  "Flotsam” Where was "Jetsam"?  My memory told me ‘flotsam’ never went anywhere without its brother term, ‘jetsam’ ; so why was this book only using  half the phrase?  And what were the awards affixed to the book’s cover?  What of the picture on the cover?  Fish swimming against an orange background with some manner of orb in the near center of the frame?

Deciding to take a moment to open the book’s cover for further investigation, there before me lay a wonderful tale told absent any words.  

A boy wanders the shore of a beach one day when an immense wave out of the ocean overwhelms him.  This wave brings with it a camera, an old camera the boy learns still contains film.  Having the film developed, the boy discovers an array of impossible  pictures of life under the sea, an imaginative world where the creature of the sea live lives as commonplace as the people above the ocean shore.    But the picture that becomes the crux of the story is the final picture the boy discovers.  Amidst all the photos of sea life, the last picture is of a child, like himself, holding a photograph of another child, holding a photograph, of another child, etc. etc.

Curious, the boy sets the picture underneath a microscope which reveals one child after next, all holding pictures of a child holding a picture of a child – until he arrives at the first picture, a boy dressed in turn-of-the –century regalia, posing for the first picture.

The gears in his mind clicking, he understands what he is to do and takes a picture of himself holding the picture of the child holding the picture of the child, etc. etc.  Once it is taken, he tosses the camera back into the ocean, where it travels through the secret world of the sea life, before ending the book on the beach somewhere else in the world, to be discovered by another child.  And so the story continues… Never to end….

From the start, with the boy walking along the beach, to the discovery of the old camera brought in by the sudden wave, through the array of stunning undersea life revealed, to the touching final picture connecting a multitude of children through the span of time, this is a story kids will certainly read again and again and again.  With the colorful detail in all the pictures, it is a veritable treasure trove, for the imaginative young one, to compose an illimitable number of tales.