Dear Fish

Meaghan,

The picture book, Dear Fish, by Chris Gall was fun to read and I think is a great introduction to the summer season! I don’t know about you but I was ready to head to the beach when I was finished reading it!

I feel this book has multiple story elements that fit into the modern fantasy genre. The whole story line is about fish coming out of the ocean and appearing in different areas around a community. There are fish everywhere; in the school, in trees, at baseball games, in homes, bathtubs and in the kitchen (to name a few). This component to the story violates natural and physical laws in our world. Fish cannot survive on dry land and most certainly cannot swim on over to a house!

While these fish are not talking characters, they are taking the place of other objects. For example, when Sally is getting ready for her birthday party, she is blowing up blow fish instead of balloons! At the baseball game, the hot dogs have been replaced with silver fish resting inside the buns.

This story has two parallel worlds: our world that we live as human beings and the world of fish. The drawings show these two words merged together. The art work is interesting because it looks like two separate scenes were drawn; the human world and then fish swimming in the ocean. It’s like these two scenes were merged together and the water was taken away if that makes any sense. While the fish are invading the human world, they appear as if they are still just swimming in the ocean.

The gateway into connecting these two worlds happened when the little boy wrote a letter to the fish asking them to visit his world. He put the note in a bottle and put it in the ocean. The fish took him up on it and invaded!