Book Summary

This story begins from the first-person point of view of a boy at eye level with a rather spooked crab on a beach. Then the author zooms out to the third-person perspective, and we see the boy sitting on the beach with his parents, surrounded by buckets of specimens, a microscope, binoculars, and a magnifying glass. He is so preoccupied with catching the crab that he doesn’t see the wave until it’s too late! When the wave passes by, he finds an old box with the inscription “Melville underwater camera” on it. The boy shows it to his parents, then to the lifeguard to see if anyone has reported it missing. When it is apparent that no one is missing it, he takes the film canister out of the camera and runs it into the 1-hour photo. There, he buys more film and develops the pictures in the camera. He takes the pictures back to the beach to have a closer look. To his immense surprise, the first picture depicts a mechanical fish in a school of normal fish, the second depicts octopuses reading to their octopus children by the light of electric eel lamps. Subsequent pictures show a blowfish hot air balloon, turtles floating over shell cities with more shell cities on their backs, tiny green aliens riding on fish, and huge starfish islands. But the most compelling picture is the last one–a girl of Asian descent holding a picture of a Scandinavian boy, who in turn is holding a picture, and so on. The boy takes out his magnifying glass to get better clarification, then switches to the microscope to see the tiniest details. He can see further back in time with each turn of the microscope. It’s similar to a modern-day message in a bottle. When his parents tell him it’s time to go home, he quickly takes out the camera, snaps a picture of himself holding the picture with the Asian girl, and tosses the camera back into the ocean. From the shoreline, it is transported by various sealife to an underwater village filled with merpeople, one of which is holding a mechanical fish! More sealife carry it to the Arctic, but it ultimately washes up on another distant shore, only to be found by a Pacific Islander girl.

Content

This book is intended for ages 3-7, but due to its complex plots and hard-to-follow concepts of time and space, this book would be most appropriate in a 3rd to 5th grade classroom. It also presents at least two points of view, which might be confusing for younger readers. Because the camera makes it way to many corners of the world and these children are represented in the pictures, this book appeals to a larger audience.

Illustrations

The pictures are so important that there is no need to have written text. Without them, the book would not exist! The illustrations are very lifelike. The author does a fantastic job of conveying both action and imagination.

Format

This book is formatted in illustrations only. Some of the pages depict several phases of action by cutting up the page into comic-book-like windows.

Overall Evaluation

Overall, I love this book and the imagination that went into creating it! I honestly think readers of all ages can appreciate it on some level, at least for the aesthetics. This book makes for lively classroom discussion and should encourage story-telling, which should in turn encourage reading other David Wiesner books. The moral of the book is that everyone has an important role to play in the history of the world and will be remembered in some way by someone. History repeats itself over and over and over…

For Future Professionals to Use With Children

This book could be used to help teach inventive story-telling and sequencing, as well as help in making predictions.