Crenshaw's Books & Decks

Flotsam is a very short wordless graphic  book full of wondrous images and a great storyline. I love wordless picture books because they are more demanding on the artist, as the images have to carry the narrative on their own, and they are more open to interpretation (more a door to the imagination than a finished story) but also more Universal.

David Wiesner's drawing and illustration style are marvellous, crispy clean, detailed, almost hyper-real, delicate at times, flamboyant at others, with a great use of colour and wondrous imagery.

Flotsam is a message-in-a-bottle sort of story, the bottle being replaced by the images in an old camera that lands on a beach where our main character is spending his day.

Life is wondrous, you just have to look at it with a bit of attention. There is magic in the ordinary and we are all interconnected. Those are the main points in the message embedded in the story.

I consider that the story is fragmented unnecessarily. I truly loved the Magritte-like photographer-in-the-photographer photograph going from the present to  the past. That is fantastic, a great concept and well realised. The pictures about the sea world that the character sees in the photos are wondrous, but less original and with more artistic and illustration trites than the rest of the imagery. To me, the story about the photographer's photo of the photographer has so much potential for development that it is a pity that the author distracted himself with the underwater world and forgot to connect the first photo in the story with the photo of the first photographer who used the camera. That would had been way more interesting and would have rounded up the story more organically. The ending of the book is great.

Awarded the  best children book for 2006, devoted to children between 5-7y.o.a, the book is also good for adults and illustration lovers.

The "book" is not a book properly speaking, as it has 40 pages in paper and 26 or so in Kindle format. There must be a name for this sort of "books" that are not really books but are not novellas either. The Kindle format gave me so many problems in my tablet that I had to return it. I think this book is great to have in paperback.