(Viking, $28)
For Donovan Hohn, the true tale of 7,200 shipwrecked rubber ducks was “a toy story too important not to follow,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Fifteen years after the Crayola-yellow bath toys and 21,600 animal mates were spilled from a container ship in the stormy North Pacific, the news reached Hohn and inspired him to do an odd-duck thing: In 2007, he quit his job as a high school English teacher to go on an Ahab-like quest to discover everything he could about what happened to the playthings. From that voyage has sprung an “adventurous, inquisitive” travelogue that whimsically invokes Melville as it chronicles Hohn’s journeys from southeast China to the Northwest Passage, and many places in between.
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The “unique pleasure” of Hohn’s story is how much else he’s able to sneak in, said Kristin Thiel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He balances abstract contemplations with wonderful instances of “self-aware humor.” Once, when he tells a woman in a bar in Alaska about his quest, she pulls up the hood of his yellow raincoat and demands he quack. And he obliges. Occasionally, he drifts too far from the toy spill, said Rob Verger in The Boston Globe. But his book is so “alive with intellectual curiosity,” that hardly matters. Believe it or not, “what Melville did for whaling, Hohn has done for plastic bath toys lost at sea.”
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