This book is fun. The images are larger than life and make a good couple with the humble story line. The story and the images are inseparable. I love how the illustrator, Loren Long, could take a pencil a cork and a can and make a boat look so alive, like a little dog or companion for the boy. The last painting is the most beautiful of the sunset and the boy with his toy boat.
I also like thinking about the creative process the writer took part in when she came up with the book. From reading the authors note I found that the book, something so lovely and full, began out as a tiny toy boat on her desk, made with a toothpick, a can, a cork and white tape. These elements that make up the boat are sort of symbolic of the writing process. Creating new ideas is sort of like taking random objects that don't originally relate and connecting them together to form a new object or idea.
This book also draws up memories of being a kid and the excitement of making toy boats. It was like rush of pure energy through my nine year old body when I thought of the idea to make a boat. I was on a canoe trip with my dad and his friend, and we were spending the night on a sand island in the middle of the river. I wasn't interested in fishing with my dad so I gleefully set about to making a worthy vessel to watch it go down the river along the bank of the island. It was so fun having to come up with materials where choices were limited. I did succeed in my endeavors with a little help from my dad's fishing tackle box and the boat sailed down stream and out of site, hopefully to be discovered by some other child. I needed passengers for my boat so I put some ants on it that I came across while hunting for materials. They were my sailors.
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