It’s the last day of Children’s Book Week, so I thought I’d reblog this post on Cece Bell’s fantastic book El Deafo to close out the week. She designed the CBW bookmark. Thanks for following my blog. I hope it’s a children’s book year for you!
Many of the books I review I seek out, but some come to me in unexpected ways. Along with the book Fleabrain Loves Frannie, I was given one I’d never heard of, called El Deafo by Cece Bell, a graphic memoir novel. I flipped through it — bunny characters, a deaf girl, school problems, and intriguing scenes like this:
I love seeing Spock with bunny ears
In this after school special, the character is deaf and some one calls them deafo, which causes Cece some soul searching.
I was hooked, started reading, and pretty much devoured all 230 some odd pages. It tells the story of a girl who contracted meningitis and lost her hearing at age 4. She gets a bulky hearing aid she wears in a pouch around her neck with wires and earbuds. It’s only partially successful. What she hears is not what people are saying.
