David Wiesner is my favorite children’s picture book author/illustrator. Despite a dearth of text, Wiesner communicates a visual story that is unmatched. Tuesday has frogs lifting into the air and flying from their watery home across the countryside into a small village. It’s “Tuesday evening, around eight” when lily pads rise out of the water and carry a large fleet of frogs into backyards. They even enter a house in which an old woman is asleep in front of her television. She has no idea she’s surrounded by happy amphibian guests. Items on a clothesline present a problem! So does a dog—until it’s confronted by an army of frogs. In the morning, police study lily pads strewn across the road. And then there’s next Tuesday…
The watercolor is
exquisite. The frogs are expressive. Scenes with foreground, middle, and
distant landscape are rendered with a luminous glow from a full moon. You feel
sorry for the frogs when they return to their secluded home in the water
at the break of day.
This book won the Caldecott Medal in 1992.
