Jim Erekson's Reviews > Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea: Marie Tharp Maps the Ocean Floor

So this is a very nice biography, and Colon's illustrations are marvelous as usual--texture, color, depth, control of static and dynamic lines. It's all we have come to expect. And Burleigh's writing is good, focusing on just the one slice of what he wanted me to think about. That's not the best part...

The moment that blew me away was halfway through the book, where Burleigh wrote,
"[Y]et a portrait of the ocean floor was coming into view.
But there was even more.
Listen."
And then I turned the page and there was an expansive wordless spread of a seascape with the mountains and trenches showing through transparent water with a tiny steamship making its way across the surface.

What a brilliant moment of counterpoint, where the words say 'listen', but the pictures say 'look' and the narrative stops for a beat while the sea changes from a line drawing to a deep and living image on the next page. This was seamlessly postmodern, without the usual wink & nod, drawing clear attention to play with frame and to the relationship between narrator and narratee.

Did Burleigh storyboard this, or was this a contribution of Colon's? It seems more like Burleigh wrote the words to move on to his discussion of plate tectonics. But even so, his breakaway from the written page by writing "Listen" was ingenious word choice. I was almost expecting there to be rushing sound coming off the page when I turned it. The whole book wasn't like this, but it was so amazing to find a caesura like that in a picturebook that I went back and changed my 4-stars to 5. I'll have to get a copy of this book for sure.