Wolf enlists three equally slandered friends into the Good Guys Club: Mr. 'Just because I've got BIG POINTY TEETH and RAZOR-SHARP CLAWS and I occasionally like to dress up like an OLD LADY, that doesn't mean… / … I'm a BAD GUY.' To prove this very fact, Mr. Wolf is right there to greet them, bemoaning his reputation. In Wiesner’s much-honored style, the paintings are cinematic, coolly restrained and deliberate, beguiling in their sibylline images and limned with symbolic allusions.įour misunderstood villains endeavor to turn over a new leaf…or a new rap sheet in Blabey's frenzied romp.Īs readers open the first page of this early chapter book, Mr. 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. 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.

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.

From 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.Ī boy at the beach picks up a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera.

Flotsam wiesner