Free Fall

Have you ever had a dream that was so wondrous and detailed that you wished you could write it all down and share it with everyone? If your answer is “yes”, then you'll enjoy this book, Free Fall, by David Wiesner. This picture book, and winner of a Caldecott Honor Award, fits its genre to a T from cover to cover, with the only words to the story being a poem on the inside jacket. 

The story focuses on a peacefully slumbering boy, who has drifted off to sleep during a midnight reading session. As he sleeps, his bedroom seamlessly shifts from reality to his dream world, where he steps onto a life sized chessboard and is greeted by the king and queen of the land. From there, as he travels through the pages, he encounters amazingly detailed scenes and characters, including a dragon, before gliding into bed from his fantastic dream. 

The creator and illustrator, David Wiesner, does a remarkable job of transitioning from scene to scene with each exquisitely detailed page, and uses the entire page to demonstrate his dreamworld. At the start of the story, Wiesner utilizes the white margin border to symbolize the rigid existence of the real world. As the reader's eyes wander from one page to the next, reality melts into a dreamland between them and expands across to the very edge of the next page with no margin or border to stop it. Each detail on one page slowly transforms on the next and flows to the other side to continue the next chapter of the story. Even the color pallet chosen for this story was somewhat muted, and the drawings themselves were drawn in a slightly hazy way much like a dream.

As an added bonus to this artfully illustrated book, readers have the ability to create their own written story to go along with the illustrations, and expand upon the author's dreamworld in their own imagination. Anyone care to dream a little?

Other award winning stories written by David Wiesner include Tuesday, The Three Pigs, and his most recent publication Flotsam.