Aquarium is a story of one young girl's dream to bring home a fish. In her imagination she swims with the fish in the ocean. As she sits day dreaming a bright orange fish leaps onto the jetty. She scoops him into a jar and races home to create an aquarium using every container she can find, each filled with water and connect by tubes and hoses. At the end of the water route she fills her small paddling pool but it is immediately clear the little fish friend needs his freedom. It is such a sweet story moment when she kisses him goodbye before placing him back in the ocean.
I am preparing a talk with Dr Robin Morrow for IBBY Australia as we welcome the IBBY Silent Book collection to our shores. This is a very exciting initiative. There are 67 books in the 2019 Silent Book collection from 16 countries. You can read about some of them in a previous post.
You would expect a 'silent book', or you may prefer the term 'wordless' book, to offer a rich visual experience but Aquarium takes this to another level. I was not surprised to learn that Cynthia Alonso is a graphic designer. The landscape format allows us to see the whole spread of the ocean; the restrained colour palette is summery and slightly retro; and the quality of the paper she has used clearly show how much care and attention she has given to her debut book. Cynthia lives in Argentina and the Portuguese title of this book is Aquàrio.
Have you seen those little videos where people reveal images hidden under a book cover. Under the dust jacket of Aquarium Cynthia Alonso has filled the space with orange fish. It would be a pity to hide these under library plastic covering. The opening end paper has transparent jars, buckets, vases, glasses and bottles of all shapes and sizes each containing swimming fish.
On the back end paper we see the little girl from the story swimming in the open ocean where all the fish can swim free. Her swimmers are decorated with the fish we first saw under the dust jacket.
Moving and evocative visual storytelling. Kirkus
In a year when so many of us were left speechless at the events of the world, there is comfort in finding books that are just as speechless as we. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they don’t have something to say. Elizabeth Bird
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