Time Flies

Rohmann, Eric

ISBN 10: 0517595990 ISBN 13: 9780517595992

Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers, 1994

Synopsis

Eric Rohmann's Caldecott Honor-winning debut is now available as a Dragonfly paperback. It is at once a wordless time-travel adventure and a meditation on the scientific theory that dinosaurs were the evolutionary ancestors of birds. The New York Times Book Review called Time Flies "a work of informed imagination and masterly storytelling unobtrusively underpinned by good science...an entirely absorbing narrative made all the more rich by its wordlessness." Kirkus Reviews hailed it as "a splendid debut."  

About this title

About the Author

Eric Rohmann's first book for children, Time Flies, was named a Caldecott Honor Book in 1995,
and was called a splendid debut by Kirkus Reviews.
Eric holds degrees in fine arts from Arizona State University and Illinois State University.  He is a former teacher, and has exhibited his artwork as numerous galleries and museums across the country.
Time Flies , a wordless picture book, is inspired by the theory that birds are the modern relatives of dinosaurs.  This story conveys the tale of a bird trapped in a dinosaur exhibit at a natural history museum.  Through Eric's use of color, readers can actually see the bird enter into a mouth of a dinosaur, and then escape unscathed.
Eric is a painter, printmaker, and a fine bookmaker, and he lives outside of Chicago.  

From Publishers Weekly

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yes, no--it's a metaphor! Rohmann's wordless first book shows a bird flying into a dinosaur museum one dark and stormy night. The bird flits about, perching on a dinosaur jaw and soaring on. As it flies past one particular behemoth, the bones of the creature are suddenly cloaked in flesh; the bird has entered a prehistoric landscape. A dinosaur eventually swallows the bird, but as it wings its way down the creature's throat and through its digestive system, the would-be predator is transformed to a skeleton and the bird returns once again to the museum hall. The meaning of this exercise is unclear, although a jacket note explains that Rohmann was "inspired by the theory that birds are the modern relatives of the dinosaurs." The target audience will likely be mystified. Slightly older readers, however, might be intrigued by the time-travel conceit and the scientifically minded will be wowed by Rohmann's oil paintings, which capture the textures of bone, tooth, eyeball, etc., with as much attentiveness and morbidity as, say, an 18th-century still life of gamebirds. Ages 4-9.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0517595990
• ISBN 13: 9780517595992
• Binding: Library Binding
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32