by Moe Zilla

Created on: July 24, 2010   Last Updated: January 21, 2012

The Lost Sailor opens "on a place on the earth where sailors travel for days on ending without ever seeing a rock or a bird or the smallest blade of grass..." But it's got an unusually dark plot. By the third page, the sailor's ship is confronting a tremendous storm, and all of his crew are tossed into the sea. His steering wheel snaps off, and then the sailor himself is tossed into the ocean. His ship "groans like death," and then sinks into the ocean, leaving the sailor drifting alone across the vast sea.

He finally ends up alone on an island, where he'll stay - alone - until nearly the end of the book. Under the glow of a full moon, "He floated near death, benumbed by cold and delirious with grief." Honestly, I'm not even sure that benumbed is a word, and I think young children may have some trouble with this book's vocabulary. There's some difficult nautical words like halyards, sextant, longitude, and latitude - and the book's pages have several paragraphs each, probably more than you'd expect in a book for very young children.

The stylish illustrations may seem familiar to anyone who's read "Hey, Al." Richard Egielski won a Caldecott Medal for that book's illustrations, and in "The Lost Sailor" he uses the same bright, simple drawing style, augmented with very clear dark outlines for all the shapes. There's something abstract about the enormous clouds on the horizon, and the book's story makes them extremely meaningful. And when the lost sailor lies desperately on the beach, crying "All is lost, all is lost" - Egielski draws him covered in shadow.

But he also draws a tiny ship on the horizon, which arrives on the next page to save the sailor. He'd been despairing that night because a fire accidentally destroyed the hut where he'd been living, burning everything he'd saved from his former ship. But his rescuer explains that the blaze is what had led them to his location. It's ironic - and, honestly, a little unsettling, since the gifted sailor was never able to escape his isolation. Despite all his abilities, in the end the only thing that saved him was wild luck.

Author Pam Conrad had already collaborated with Richard Egielski on a book called The Tub People, and his illustrations lend a certain magic to what could've been a generic story about a shipwreck. (Instead of "Once upon a time," it opens with the words "Once upon a sea...") Conrad died at the age of 49, just four years after writing this book, but it's nice that she got to leave behind a legacy. According to Wikipedia, one of her next books - The Stories of Levittown - was nominated for the prestigious Newberry award.

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