Flotsam

A boy at the beach finds an old fashioned camera washed up in the surf and, once he gets the film developed, discovers it holds photographs of an ocean no one has ever actually seen: a mechanical fish swimming among real ones, an octopus reading in an armchair on the seafloor, pufferfish drifting like hot air balloons, a giant turtle carrying an entire small city on its shell, tiny green aliens inspecting starfish shaped islands. Using a magnifying glass and eventually a microscope, the boy notices something stranger still hidden inside one photograph: it shows a child holding an earlier photograph of another child holding an even earlier one, a chain of ordinary kids stretching back roughly a century, each one having found this same camera on this same beach. He takes his own photograph to add to the chain, then throws the camera back into the ocean exactly as everyone before him apparently did, and the book's final wordless pages follow it drifting across seas, past icebergs, and through a mermaid's underwater city until it washes up on another beach for another child to find.

Wiesner tells the entire story without a word of text, so a reader has to do all the same detective work the boy does, tracing the recursive photographs and piecing together what the chain means before the final pages confirm it. His watercolors are dense with small, rewarding detail meant to be pored over rather than glanced at once, which makes this one of the slower, more absorbing wordless books to read with a child who likes hunting for what they missed the first time.