Today is a Tuesday. Valentine’s Day was yesterday and my birthday was
Saturday, but today is a plain old ordinary Tuesday, and I have no
particular reason to expect that anything unusual will occur. Except I
can’t help harboring that hope, since David Wiesner has painted Tuesday
in such an extraordinary light.
Tuesday is a
Caldecott-winning picture book that is virtually wordless and seems
designed to encourage readers to embrace enchanting possibilities.
Tuesday is probably the most mundane day of the week. It’s not the
weekend. It’s not the beginning, end or even middle of the work week. At
least with Thursday, you know that Friday is coming soon. But Tuesday?
Dull City, right? Wrong. After reading this book, I may never see
Tuesday the same way again.
Wiesner tells his tale primarily
through a series of full-page watercolor paintings. We have seven
full-blown two-page spreads, three two-page spreads with panel inserts
zeroing in on individuals, two pages that feature a series of three long
strip paintings and three full-page paintings. Alternating the format
of the paintings helps to add interest and variation, as does the
occasional inclusion of a blank white page featuring only a few words of
explanatory text.
So what happens on Tuesday that is so
amazing? The flight of the frogs. They rise, en masse, sitting serenely
atop their lily pads, which function like flying carpets. It does not
appear as though they have any idea where they are going or any desire
to change course. They are being taken for an astounding ride, and they
merely want to soak in all of the beauty and excitement they can. Their
eyes are black, wide and shiny, with little pinpricks of white that
accentuate the impression that while this may look like a surrealistic
dream to any casual observer, for them, it is a dream come true.
We
catch glimpses of their night flight, while Wiesner leaves us plenty of
room to imagine what might happen between panels. Some frogs seem more
appreciative than others. I love the one that zooms along on his lily
pad, his eyes and mouth wide open, smiling as expansively as a frog can
and seemingly urging his vegetative vehicle on as he scares the feathers
off a crow perched on a wire. Toward the end of the book, when their
adventure is over, one brown frog sits with his face in his webbed hand,
glowering at the world because he’s so disgruntled to be back in the
water.
On one page, we zoom in so close that they look like
invading aliens, hovering in mid-air. What are we to make of this
puzzling migration? To me, it feels positively providential, with a
sense of solemnity mingled with joy. It reminds me a great deal of the Fantasia 2000
segment featuring the flying whales. Such fluid grace… But not
everybody sees it that way. I think my favorite painting in the book is
the single-page illustration at 11:21 p.m. in which they go cruising
past the window of a man who is enjoying a midnight snack. There he is,
sitting at the table in his pajamas and robe, a sandwich nearly to his
mouth, when out of the corner of his eye, something strange catches his
attention, and he is captured in such a classic “What the…?” expression
that I laugh out loud every time I look at him.
As the book neared its end, I was reminded of Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,
which, the narrator explained, was something that just “happened to
happen and was not very likely to happen again.” For the frogs, this is
probably true. But next week, who knows whose turn it will be for an
adventure? Maybe even yours…
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