Tuesday

By David Wiesner

Frogs on lily pads float up out of the marsh one Tuesday night and sail over a sleeping town, and the book reports the whole thing with a straight face and a running clock, like the evening news.

Tuesday evening, around eight. That is the first thing you get, a time stamped in the corner like a police log. Then the lily pads start to rise. Frogs float up out of the marsh, sitting on their pads like commuters on the bus, and drift over a sleeping town. They flap through hanging laundry. A pack of them swarms a dog and chases it down the street. An old woman dozes in her armchair while the television flickers and the frogs sail in through the window and take over the channel. By dawn the magic runs out, the pads drop, and the frogs hop home across the lawns while baffled police officers stand in a street full of lily pads with their notebooks out, writing something down. And then the last page: next Tuesday, 7:58 in the evening, and the pigs are in the air. Not one word of explanation anywhere in it.

The joke is the flat delivery. Wiesner draws flying frogs with the same seriousness a newspaper uses for a traffic report, and a child gets that contradiction instantly, which is why a room laughs before anyone has said a thing. Then the clock does the teaching. Every stretch of the night is stamped with a time, so a child has to put the night in order and work out what happened between one picture and the next, guessing, checking, going back, with nothing to sound out. It won the Caldecott Medal. And the last page, the pigs, sends a child straight back to the beginning to see whether the book was warning them all along.