WOW Review: Volume XVII, Issue 4 • Page 7 of 12 • Worlds of Words

Gifts from the Garbage Truck: A True Story About the Things We (Don’t) Throw Away
Written by Andrew Larsen
Illustrated by Oriol Vidal
Sourcebooks eXplore, 2024, 36 pp (unpaged)
ISBN: 978-1728283517

Nelson lives in East Harlem, New York City, where as a child, he learned to look for the value in everything. His mother showed him the importance of finding new uses for things that people throw away. For example, she taught him how to upcycle scraps of wood into bird feeders. When Nelson’s father, a merchant marine, sent Nelson letters from faraway places, he collected the stamps and experimented with different ways to display his collection to tell the stories of his father’s travels. He found tossed toys, which he brought home to fix and give as Christmas gifts for his siblings. Later, Nelson became a New York City sanitation worker, and found treasures in the bags of garbage he hauled. Some of these treasures were perfect already, and some he brought home to repair. There were so many that he brought them to his sanitation garage where they were displayed in ways that told their stories. Over his career, Nelson’s collection grew until it became a museum.

This text is based on Nelson Molina’s career of finding worth in everything, and the story of his museum acts as a counternarrative to our overuse of disposable goods. Treasures in the Trash is a curated collection of over 45,000 objects that he rescued from the landfill. The story is a testament to Nelson’s commitment to the environment, his neighborhood, and his artistic vision. It serves as an example of an “ordinary” person changing the world. Author Andrew Larsen’s prose is sparse and serves as a call to action for environmentalism without being didactic. This book includes a beautiful foreword written by Nelson, who talks about his joy when something in his museum triggers memories in a visitor. It also includes photographs of him and his garbage truck that add to the power of the text.

Oriol Vidal’s illustrations burst with color and light and show a multiethnic neighborhood that is warm and abounding with the vigor of the everyday. He mixes highly graphic illustrations of Nelson, that encapsulate his strength of character, with almost French impressionistic scenes of El Barrio, that highlight its delicacy and beauty. This contrast helps to show both the work and the art that is integral to Nelson’s life.

Readers can find out more about Nelson and his collection at the Sanitation Foundation website. The website includes articles about Nelson and his work along with video interviews.

Gifts from the Garbage Truck could be a part of a text set on repurposing objects on a grand scale. The set could also include titles such as Zero Waste: How One Community is Leading a World Recycling Revolution (Alan Drummond, 2023), Flipflopi: How a Boat Made from Flip-Flops is Helping to Save the Ocean (Linda Lodding, Dipesh Pabari, & Michael Mwangi 2023), and Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay (Susan Hood & Sally Comport, 2016).

Andrew Larsen is an award-winning Canadian children’s author. Some of his titles are Goodnight, Hockey Fans (Jacqui Lee, 2017), The Man Who Loved Libraries: The Story of Andrew Carnegie (Katty Maurey, 2017), and Jungle Cat (Udayana Lugo, 2023). He credits his prolific writing output to summers spent with his grandparents in a cottage with no TV. More information can be found on his website.

The illustrator, Oriol Vidal, studied fine art at the University of Barcelona and now lives in Madrid, Spain. Along with his work in children’s illustrations, he also works with character design, concept art, and storyboards. More information can be found on his website.

Melissa B. Wilson, Cardiff, UK

Authors retain copyright over the reviews published in this journal and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the following Creative Commons License: