Ducks overboard! A true story of plastic in our oceans

As in his 2018 title Curiosity: The Story of a Mars Rover, Motum smartly employs a whimsical character introducing solid scientific concepts, a task this book's child-friendly star (Rubber Duckie, you're the one!) performs swimmingly. Our hero began life almost thirty years ago when it was produced in China, loaded onto a cargo ship, and shipped to the U.S. for distribution. While in transit in the North Pacific, its container was swept overboard and the contents -- including twenty-eight thousand rubber ducks -- dumped in the water. Rubber Duckie is left helplessly floating in the ocean, and readers receive a clear, understandable introduction to oceanography and the environmental threats of plastic in the world's seas. Bright digital illustrations depict the marine life below, including a whale swallowing a plastic bag and a sea turtle caught in an abandoned fishing net. Expository sentences, with their smaller typeface distinguishing them from the main narrative, add context to these sightings. Two uncluttered maps, enhanced with relevant notes (such as the effects of the flotsam on the Great Barrier Reef), show the global paths of many of the real-life twenty-eight thousand. Rubber Duckie, however, flounders in the Pacific Garbage Patch; is again tossed out of the gyre; and is finally discovered on a beach, picked up by one of the many volunteers who attempt to clean up our shores. Back matter provides a diagram, accompanying scientific discussion of ocean currents, information about the 1992 rubber duck toy spill, facts about plastics, and ways readers can help or become citizen scientists. Betty Carter November/December 2021 p.133(c) Copyright 2021. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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. (Informational picture book. 6-8) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.