Ammu’s Bottle Boat

When she sets her plastic bottle boat to bob from stream to sea, Ammu doesn’t know what danger she has set adrift – that it might end up in the belly of a whale. The light verse that follows the journey of the bottle boat evokes the casual carelessness with which we destroy the natural world, while illustrations underline that horror with a clever spin on a Japanese art form. Fish and sea creatures used as printing plates in ‘Gyotaku’ are replaced here with plastic objects like bottle caps and bubble wrap – and the displacement of nature with modern-day trash is complete.