DUCKS OVERBOARD!

A ducky’s-eye view of an ocean rapidly becoming more polluted.

Speaking for 28,000 bath toys that were washed overboard on the way from Hong Kong to Seattle in 1992, a yellow plastic duck tells its story—from rolling off first a Chinese assembly line and then later a huge cargo ship at sea to, long afterward, floating at last in a child’s tub after being plucked from the flotsam on a littered beach. This plot may seem familiar to readers of Eve Bunting’s still-in-print Ducky, illustrated by David Wisniewski (1997). What’s new is how, while bobbing over busy ocean depths, past colorful fish and undulating jellies, Motum’s narrator witnesses a whale swallowing a plastic bag, a struggling sea turtle tangled in a fishing net, and the vast swirl of waste plastic dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The author goes for a broad view in both wide-angled illustrations of litter floating or washed ashore and in adding notes about ocean currents, the value as well as hazards of plastics, and other related topics to his urgent message that our oceans are in trouble. A set of activities and organizations at the end add fresh incentive for young recyclers and eco-activists to get off the stick. Workers in early scenes have Asian features; the child and their dad at the end appear to be White.

An awesome odyssey that also makes a telling point, both worthy of repeated iterations.