Review of 2007 Caldecott Winner: David Wiesner’s ‘Flotsam’

Flotsam. By David Wiesner. Houghton Mifflin/Clarion, 32 pp., $17.95. Ages 3 and up.

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.

Best line/Picture: One that shows Wiesner’s witty use of detail: The fringe on a sofa and ottoman provide a subtle visual echo of the tentacles of an octopus sitting on an armchair.

Worst line/picture: None.

Recommended … without reservations.

Published: October 2006.

Links: www.clarionbooks.com

Furthermore: Wiesner received earlier Caldecott Medals for Tuesday and The Three Pigs. His Sector 7 and Free Fall were Caldecott Honor books. If you found this review of Flotsam helpful, you may also want to read the review of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, who won the Newbery Medal for The Tale of Despereaux. The review was posted on One-Minute Book Reviews on January 27, 2007, and is archived in the Children’s Books category.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

One-Minute Book Reviews is an indepdendent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of the Plain Dealer, and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. A new review of a book for children or teenagers appears every Saturday on this site.

June Casagrande Minds Your Language

A grammar columnist tries to compete with authors of better books such as Woe Is I

Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite. Penguin, 199 pp., $14, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

June Casagrande is a snob about how unsnobbish she is. She says early in Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies that “the problem with language today is that the people writing the rules are such blowhards that not even they themselves can deny it.” Then she spends much of the book listing her own rules, which often make no more sense than those she dislikes. She insists, for example, that the short form of “until” is “till” not “’til.” Why? Just “check your dictionary,” she says. Why follow dictionaries on this one and not on issues on which she disagrees with some of them? And aren’t some dictionaries more trustworthy than others? “’Til,” she says, “just happens to be wrong.”

A larger problem with this book that good writing is about much more than grammar. And from her title onward, Casagrande trades on humor that is often snide, clichéd, or sophomoric. “Meanies come in many forms, not just human,” she writes of grammar snobs. “They can be not only animal, but also mineral. In rare cases, they can even be vegetable, but we’ll talk about William Safire later.” What’s the point of such a personal attack on the New York Times columnist? The tone of Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies resembles that of a high school student who feels superior to but wants desperately to join the popular kids – a group that in this case includes Lynne Truss, author of the popular Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

One of the few well-known grammar authorities Casagrande does not attack is Patricia T. O’Conner, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of Woe Is I (reviewed on this blog on Dec. 30, 2006, and archived in the “How to” category), the best grammar book for students or people who have forgotten what they learned in the eighth grande. Casagrade may have spared Woe Is I because it comes from one of her publisher’s imprints. Or maybe she just realizes that it’s a much better book.

Best line: Casagrande makes some good points about frequently confused words such as “disburse” and “disperse.” She quotes a line from The Da Vinci Code: “His Holiness can disperse monies however he sees fit.” This sentence, she says, suggests that the fictional pope was “hurling fistfuls of euros from a hole in his Plexiglas popemobile.”

Worst line: Many of the worst lines are pointless jabs at other grammarians, such as the attack Safire. Others are sophomoric : “I had one college professor who was a bona fide jerkwad. It took me a while to realize that he was a bona fide jerkwad on account of the fact that I was a bona fide kiss-up.”

Editor: David Cashion

Furthermore: Casagrande writes the weekly column “A Word, Please” for several community news supplements to the Los Angeles Times. Unlike Woe Is I and other books on language, Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies lacks an index. So it’s often harder to find information there than in other volumes, especially if you want an answer to a specific question instead of broad guidance. If you’re looking for a good grammar book, visit Patricia O’Conner’s site www.grammarphobia.com.

Published: March 2006

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.