The Whale

By Ethan and Vita Murrow

  • is an American artist.

  • is an American artist, author and educator.

  • First published in the UK in 2015.

  • 4-8 according to the Internet. I read it with 5-12-year-olds.

Who are those children? Where are they? I prefer these questions to simple “What can you see on the book cover?”

It looks like they are out at sea and they have something to do with the coast or fishing. They looks wet and windswept and they have binoculars so they are looking for something. On closer inspection, I think they are watching whales. It looks like a whale’s tail if you look closer.

The word that children might not know is ‘hoax’. Can you provide any examples of a hoax? Is The Loch Ness Monster a hoax or is it real.

What makes you think that the children are interested in discovering the spotted whale?

They’ve got newspaper articles, posters, models of a whale, cameras and listening devices. I would say they are bordering the obsession. Do they know each other? Some children think they are friends or siblings. I don’t tell them that the clue is in the layout of the page. We will tell them later.

So, they get the equipment ready, a collection of maps and manuals. They install recording and tracking devices and set off to chase the spotted whale. Some children still think they are together.

See the gutter in this picture. It is a whole, there’s nothing missing in it. And this is the first time those two actually meet. Although before we could see both of them on every page, only now they are together. Ethan and Vita Murrow trick us into thinking that they are together in the page before (see the second picture) by making it the same colour and style. Only if we look at gutter, we spot that the line breaks and they are two different scenes.

The boats collide and the kids fall into the choppy waters joined by their equipment and dreams to spot the whale. Both boats are shattered and absolutely in pieces. How realistic it is! My students thought of the book The Widows Broom by Chris Van Allsburg. We have read a few of his stories and they already noticed that he illustrated very surreal and impossible in a very realistic manner. It makes you sometimes believe things that you normally laugh at. For example, all of my students sort of know that there’s no such thing as witches, but they believe Chris Van Allsburg. The same here. We were told that the whole story might be a hoax, but the realistic illustrations make us believe the pictures and trust them.

This is my favourite picture and when seeing it for the first time, I thought it looked like a screenshot I make sometimes when watching videos on YouTube. My husband and co-teacher looked at the pictures and said that’s very James Bond.

The children join forces and instead of giving up after the collision, they put two broken boats together and make one. And all this time we see both of them in in the scene.

Another beautiful film-like picture is below. That’s very David Attenborough. Whales approaching the boat, their backs so close to the surface.

The whale jumps over the boat like in a film from the 90s called Free Willy.

Great Spotted Whale! says the local newspaper later. My students enjoyed this bit. Spotted as in having spots? Or is it spotted as in seen?

It’s the end of the book but not the end of the lesson. Ethan and Vita described the process of creating this book on Picturebookmakers. Please, check it out.