The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois
Saturday, September 22, 2007 by test
I got this for a steal at a recent book sale, still wrapped up in plastic. I was having second thoughts but realizing that it is a Newbery winner, I decided that it was a good buy.
On the back blurb: An absurd and fantastic tale … Truth and fiction cleverly intermingled.” - SLJ
Professor William Waterman Sherman just wants to be alone. So he decides to take a year off and spend it crossing the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon the likes of which no one has seen. But when he is found after just three weeks floating in the Atlantic among the wreckage of twenty hot-air balloons, the world is naturally eager to know what happened. How did he end up with so many balloons … and in the wrong ocean?
I didn’t regret this read. And at the risk of spoiling things for you, I come back with more questions … questions one step ahead of those above:
If you were shipwrecked (ok, balloon-wrecked) on a supposedly uninhabited island, only to discover that on that island, you are probably among the richest people in the world with close to a billion dollars to spend a day. Everyday could be a vacation and there is no limit to what you occupy your time with. Would you want to stay or go? What if you were forced to stay as a perennial guest? What if you had to stay even in the light of dire circumstances?
Read the rest of my review here.
