Photographer crash lands in airplane with only a Polaroid camera. Too many holes in the story. It had a quality of "then he woke up" at the end. ( )

A man and his camera fall from a plane in the sky into a remote village that is unfamiliar with photography. When Flash takes a picture of the villagers with his instant camera, they are frightened by the bright light of the flash that they mistake for gunfire. When the paper feeds out of the camera and their image appears, they see it as magic and are awestruck at how they can be in two places at once. When Flash explains the process of photography, their fear turns into excitement as they all want to be photographed. With only 9 pictures remaining, how will Flash decide who will be photographed? This fun story makes you appreciate the “magic” of photography by experiencing it for the first time through the eyes of uncivilized people. The characters are not well developed, but the plot drives the story with its fresh approach to a view of a technology that we take for granted. Elementary school readers may find it hard to believe that someone has never seen a photograph, but it would bridge conversation to culture and people of remote parts of the world who are really not exposed to the same technology. ( )

Read for a fiction review committee. Thought I'd like it based on the back of the book. A man crashes in a plane, but he and his camera survive. He has ten photos left, and has to decide which ten photos would best document his experience. He takes his ten photos, although the last one takes him off a cliff, where he might have died, but instead he wakes up inside the plane he crashed in, being rescued. The pilot says everything burned, and that Flash was clever to think of alerting them by using his camera flash. Initially Flash thought he hallucinated all the people and pictures, but then realizes that he really did interact with those people because they're in his pictures which are all formed into a melted pile in his hands.
It was very simple and might be good for an older ESL student. ( )