FLOODED

A busy urban animal populace, initially oblivious to an observant monkey, grapples with the problem of rising water.

Like a lost-in-the-shuffle Lorax, the monkey (a tamarin or patas monkey, perhaps), spying the problem and its solution on the title page, tries repeatedly to alert the preoccupied citizens. Giraffes and other large animals can ignore the rising water at first, but smaller ones struggle. (Ever-clever rats are quick to commandeer all manner of tiny watercraft: They crew through a restaurant and take a museum audio tour in a raft.) At the museum, the monkey rescues a low-hanging, Vermeer-esque painting as the water rises ever higher. Street vendors sell oxygen bottles and goggles, and animals stage underwater demonstrations. “Everyone needed it sorted out. But no one knew what to do…” The monkey is finally successful in engaging everyone, tug-of-war fashion, to work together for a solution. Ilustrajo’s simple plotting permits interpretation of the text either as a celebration of community cooperation or an allegorical warning of climate change—or both. Either way, she cautions that such environmental calamities bring consequences. “Nothing was quite the same as before. There were lots of new problems. But now they knew the only way to fix a problem…was together.” The muted, gray-blue palette, punctuated only by the monkey’s golden tail, brings to life often amusing scenes in this bad news–good news fable.

Impressively deep—even after the water recedes.