Synopsis: Perky Little Boat takes the reader through calm sea, wild waves, past whirlpools, storms and perilous rocks. It plays with its sea friends, including a whale, an octopus, dolphins and penguins, and continues its adventure sailing over the edge of the world and beyond.

Review: 'Little Boat' champions a spirit of adventure, independence, overcoming what seem like insurmountable odds, and a simple sense of joyous play. The book has a nice design, including a front cover with a cut-out porthole window. Thomas Docherty has taken evident delight in showing many different ways of painting water, often it looks almost sculptural in its high-peaked wave, bubbles and foaming curls. The scene showing the boat among 'treacherous rocks' has very atmospheric, almost Tim Burton gothic look to it.

Some of the illustrations run full-bleed to the edge of the pages, other scenes are set in a circular format as though being seen through a porthole, a spyglass or binoculars. The circular pages make the reader feel she is sailing alongside the boat, peering at it, while the full-bleed pages make the reader forget herself and draw her more into experiencing the thrill of the action with the boat. These full-bleed pages predominate toward the end of the book, cumulating in the book's greatest visual feat, the sense of Little Boat pitching over the side of the world... and then continuing on the next page to sail, the perspective having righted itself so that the former world now seems to lie on its side.

This scene reminded me of three things: one, the thrill of that moment in playing a video game, when the character stumbles on a part of the set where a programmer has neglected to create an impenetrable boundary on the edge of the created world, and the character manages to walk off the set into a blank white void and keep walking. The second thing was the scene at the end of the film 'The Truman Show', when Truman sails to the edge of his artificial world, bumps his boat up against its walls and walks through the door to the greater world outside. The third thing is the famous scene in Narnia's 'Voyage of the Dawn Treader'', when the mouse Reepicheep exults at the thought of coming to the edge of the world: "That's how I've always imagined it – the World like a great round table and the waters of all the oceans endlessly pouring over the edge. The ship will tip up – stand on her head – for one moment we shall see over the edge – and then, down, down, the rush, the speed–" In some ways, this book feels like a very simplified version of that Narnia book, a ship's adventure story with the people taken out.

After this thrilling edge-of-the-world scene, the designer reclaims the porthole format, making the book suddenly calm down and feel safer. The readers understands that the story is not going to end with an incomprehensible mind-blowing philosophical jump (a disappointment for some readers, a reassurance for others). The last spread gets in one last picture of the boat tearing off into the waves again, showing that while the weird stuff is over just for now, but the voyage is by no means finished. The final endpapers show the anchor bubbling its way through the water, reinforcing Little Ship's early claim of independence, 'I chart my own course and I drop my own anchor'.

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2008-06-29