Rebecca Hogue Wojahn is a reader, a writer and a librarian. As an author of fiction and non-fiction for children ages four and up, she knows what’s happening in children’s books!
Rebecca is currently reading for the Non-fiction (MG/YA) panel, but still has time to review books outside of her Cybils reading duties. Today she reviews a title nominated for a Picture Book Cybil, David Wiesner’s Flotsam.
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David Wiesner does it again. The author/illustrator of Caldecott-winning books Tuesday, The Three Little Pigs, and Honor-winning Sector 7, and Free Fall has come up with another wordless picture book who’s storyline is more than a little enigmatic. While at the beach, a boy comes across an old-fashioned camera washed up with the driftwood and other flotsam on the shore. When he discovers there is film in the camera, he takes it in to be developed. And this is where Wiesner’s imagination kicks in. The pictures show fantastical underwater scenes–a mechanical fish swimming in a school of live fish deep under the sea, an octopus reading aloud to other sea creatures, green aliens visiting seahorses–all painted vividly and realistically with watercolors. The last photo is a picture of a child on a beach…