SuitabookSearching for Treasure
Johanna Bell
- Reading
- Read the prominent repeated text first, allowing time to search the spreads together. On another pass, follow the smaller facts selectively, then discuss how the final gatefold changes the meaning of ‘treasure’.
- Themes
- Curiosity through close observation: A beach walk becomes a search along the high-tide line, with creatures, shells, tracks and other small details revealed through looking closely. The book presents careful attention as a way of encountering the variety and wonder of coastal life.
- Coastal change and cycles: The book connects the ebb and flow of tides with beaches reshaping themselves and with material and organisms found along the high-tide line. It appears to present the coast as continually changing, with discovery arising from both movement and what is left behind.
- Fact and imagination: Small factual details sit within large illustrative spreads, while the final gatefold introduces an imaginative transformation of the search. The book appears to move between identifying real coastal life and allowing discovery to become creative invention.
- Worth knowing
- Some shoreline discoveries include shark’s eggs, ghost crabs, cuttlefish, shells, seaweed, fish remains, feathers, eggs and a dolphin skull. The book also discusses tides, storms, adaptation and life washed ashore.