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books

Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller by Joseph Lambert

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The Cybils graphic novel categories were full of true life stories this year – a couple of graphic memoirs and two or three (depending on your definition) historical biographies. Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller was a standout among them – just really well-done overall, with a fascinating true story and art that does more than just illustrate the book.

The relationship between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller is a fairly well-known one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to mine the same material in new and interesting ways. Lambert uses Annie Sullivan’s own letters as a springboard for the story, thereby grounding it in historical fact. It’s also a great way to give the reader some personal insight into Annie’s mind and allow us to experience the many frustrations as well as triumphs she experienced while working with Helen.

The story jumps back and forth in time, between Annie’s childhood in an almshouse and at the Perkins School for the Blind to her time as a young adult with Helen at the Kellers’ home. (The technique is well-intentioned, but sometimes transitions are difficult to pick up on.) This makes the book much more Annie’s story than Helen’s. We get a clear picture of Annie as a determined and intelligent woman, sometimes quick to an outpouring of temper, but well-matched to deal with Helen in her younger years.

One of the best techniques used here is the art, which really illuminates Helen’s transition to understanding the world around her. Before Annie is able to communicate with Helen, Helen’s world as drawn from her point of view is gray and shapeless. As the idea that things have names begins to crystallize for her, so too does the world around her. It’s a simple and brilliant visual idea, something so well-suited to a comic book about a blind girl.

I wouldn’t call the art beautiful, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s well-done and visually interesting, though sometimes the text can be a bit difficult to read. This is a great example of a graphic book where writing and art go hand-in-hand, each necessary to the other.

The end of the book focuses some on a plagiarism scandal that I hadn’t know about previously. Helen wrote a story as a child called The Frost King that was later discovered to be very similar to another author’s story. When this comes to light, Annie is accused of copying the story and passing it off as Helen’s, or of narrating the story to Helen, who then copied it. It was difficult for Helen to understand the concept of owning words, and the book leaves this pretty open-ended, which frustrated me (but perhaps that’s more of a personal failing than the book’s). It certainly encouraged me to do some further reading after I had finished the book, which is not a bad thing at all.

This will certainly appeal to kids already interested in Helen Keller, who seems to be a perennially popular topic for school reports. I can also see it being used in classrooms in conjunction with Miss Spitfire or a viewing/production of The Miracle Worker (which was put on by my own high school class when I was a teenager).

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China by Na Liu and Andres Vera Martinez

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I mentioned previously that the Cybils graphic novels categories had two memoirs this year, and Little White Duck was the middle grade selection. It’s the story of Na Liu’s childhood growing up in 1970s China, beginning near the end of Mao Zedong’s life. Rather than tell one linear story, she instead chooses to show us her early life in a series of vignettes, some more engrossing than others.
The vignettes cover a range of incidents, some touching upon major national events (Chairman Mao’s death, the great famine), others relaying a more personal, familial story (a visit to some poorer cousins, a mistake with some chicks while attempting to emulate elders). Through these very short stories, Liu makes the reader aware of the how different her childhood was from our own childhoods in a different place and time. Importantly, though, she also makes us realize what we hold in common: love of family, childhood fears and jealousies and confusion, the need to impress the adults around you.
Vignette-style stories are always a risk, in much the same way that short story collections are: it’s very unlikely all stories are going to be knock-it-outta-the-park incredible. The vignettes in Little White Duck are a bit uneven, some memorable, some not. What is consistently excellent, though, is the art. Wow, this is some gorgeous art. Everything about it is beautiful: shapes, colors, expression. I could pore over these pages and completely ignore the words and I’d be a happy reader. It’s easily digestible art, too: not cartoony, but not too photo-realistic either. I know some kids who would really dig it.
For kids inquisitive about another (real!) place and time, this would be a great choice. And the vignette style could be a real plus for kids who sometimes struggle to read what can seem like very long chapter-less graphic novels (or the longer chapters in traditional novels).
I tried to think of some good readalikes, but really, Abby gave me plenty: The Wall by Peter Sis, Kampung Boy by Lat, Drawing from Memory
by Allen Say. Her Goodreads post has a few more.

Darkroom by Lila Quintero Weaver

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I was thrilled to be a round 2 judge in this year’s Cybils awards, helping select the winners of both the middle grade and young adult graphic novels. I had actually only read one of the finalists before the shortlists were announced, so I had a terrific crop of new reading to dig into. Among them were two memoirs of two different places and eras, and I enjoyed them both quite a lot, for different reasons: Little White Duck by Na Liu and Andres Vera Martinez (middle grade) and Darkroom by Lila Quintero Weaver (young adult). I intended to review them both here, but I discovered I had a lot to say about Darkroom, so I’ll discuss Little White Duck in a future post.
When Lila was five, her family moved from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Marion, Alabama. It was 1961, and the American South was heavy with Jim Crow, segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. In that time, the dominant white group had not yet decided to marginalize people of Latin descent, who were not yet emigrating to the United States in the waves they do now. So the Quinteros were not reviled like their black neighbors, but nor were they quite accepted, either. This made Lila a bit of an in-betweener, neither black nor white, and therefore gave her a unique perspective on the events that unfolded in the 60s.
I normally avoid stories about race relations in the 60s. I’ve learned about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement since the moment I began attending school, but more than that, I just find it all incredibly depressing, mostly because I still see so many of the same awful attitudes reflected in my peers today (toward black people and other marginalized groups, too). (You should probably know that I live in the American South and have my entire life.)
Despite my predisposition to not enjoy these kinds of stories, though, I quite liked it. Lila describes how she, as a child and a teenager, reacted to what was going on around her: what she witnessed, what she heard about, what was hidden from her. Because of her unique vantage point, she learned at an early age what it meant to hold a prejudice, and she learned to fight against it. She also weaves in her own experience as a Latina and the prejudices people had about her family. She was constantly embarrassed by her parents’ use of Spanish in public, for instance, and she yearned to look more like the white ideal espoused by so many of her classmates. It’s not a story entirely about race and culture, either: Lila also tells us about her everyday life, her parents’ vocations and values, her friends, and so on. While this could have been a dry treatise on the evils of Jim Crow, instead it’s a deeply personal story – of both Lila and our country.
The black and white illustrations are competent, though not breathtaking. She uses the black and white medium to great effect, particularly shadows. She also varies the composition of the pages, creating some with strict panels, some with full-page illustrations, and some that are a mixture of the two. One particularly memorable spread features a drawing of a history textbook Lila’s class used, with the actual text reproduced. (This particular textbook reminded me strongly of some of the textbooks purportedly being currently used in some Louisiana schools, where slaves were happy and well-treated and the KKK was an upstanding community organization.)
While it’s very well-done, I think the appeal is a bit limited. The perspective is clearly that of an adult reflecting on childhood. It’s a lovely, poetic reflection, though, with a fantastic parallel beginning and end. For readers interested in graphic memoirs, this is a good selection, and it’s particularly impressive considering it was a school assignment for Weaver, and her first published effort.

Finished copy checked out from my local library.

Giants Beware! by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado

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Giants Beware! is another home run for First Second. It’s got lively full-color art, an adventurous plot, and a dash of humor that all add up to a supremely entertaining read for the middle grade set.
Claudette has grown up hearing stories about her father, who lost his legs fighting a fearsome dragon (and survived). She’s also heard stories about how a threatening giant was chased from her town, and she’s very disturbed to learn that no one bothered to kill it – they just let it get away! Claudette decides to fix this mistake. She tricks her younger brother Gaston and her best friend Marie into pursuing the giant from the story, and the three encounter all sorts of danger and cause all sorts of mayhem on their adventure.
I liked how Aguirre played with gender roles. Gaston is your typical scaredy-cat (and also an accomplished pastry chef) while Claudette is the brave one, but neither character is a stereotype. Marie aspires to be a princess when she grows up, and Claudette respects her for it (“Wanting to be a princess is a weird career choice, but if anyone’s smart enough to pull it off, it’s you”). But that doesn’t make Marie a standard fairy tale princess. In fact, each of the supporting characters is given time to shine, since their unique talents help get them out of scrapes. And by the end of the story, all three kids have learned how to be braver, or less impulsive, or more honest. And their friendship has grown and matured, too.
Giants Beware is part of a growing trend of full-color adventure graphic novels, and I’m glad for it. It stands up well with Zita the Spacegirl, Bone, Earthling, Jellaby and the like. It’s its own unique story, too – the French feel makes it stand apart, and Claudette’s energy and bloodthirstiness aren’t matched by any other heroine I’ve read (that’s a good thing).
The art is so good, too. It’s full of terrific facial expressions that add character and make you laugh out loud. Each character is distinctive, even the ancillary ones. And it’s in full color, making the entire thing beautiful and just wonderful to pore over again and again. There’s no cliffhanger, but at least one of the characters hints at further adventures to come, meaning we can hopefully expect a sequel sometime soon.
There were a couple of things that struck me as odd. There were quite a few typos that nagged at me after a while. Unfortunately, these stand out more in a graphic novel than they do in a regular novel, there being fewer words to work with. And Gaston may be a poor choice of name for kids who are probably only familiar with it from Beauty and the Beast (although it is amusing to juxtapose the two characters).
But I’m nitpicking. This is such a fun read, and a great example of what the format can do. Highly recommended.
Book borrowed from the library.

Fables: Inherit the Wind by Bill Willingham

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Warning: Spoilers for the previous Fables volume, Superteam, abound in this review.
A new Fables volume is always a good thing. I was a little disappointed with the last installment, but even when a volume is a bit off, it’s still better than most comics I’ve had a crack at. Inherit the Wind is a fine follow-up to the somewhat anticlimactic defeat of Mr. Dark, mostly because it promises new directions and new storylines to explore.
The title is a reference to the death of the North Wind, aka Bigby Wolf’s father and the Cubs’ grandfather. The main storyline involves the zephyrs’ deliberations to determine who will be the new North Wind – one of the cubs, naturally. They’re put to a series of tests, and the new King is not who you might expect.
The other main story follows Bufkin and his sidekicks as they try and undermine the Nome King’s tyrannical rule over Oz. It should come as a surprise to no one that I love how much Willingham writes about Oz and its inhabitants (definitely a new perspective on Ozma!).
Another story follows Rose Red’s return to the Farm, and yet another shows how newly-thin Mrs. Spratt is coping with her master’s death.
There’s a lot going on, and most of it is set-up for the new stories Willingham has planned after the Mr. Dark arc, but it never feels like straight exposition. I really enjoy seeing how the events of the past volumes have impacted each character. My one quibble is that each of these stories is broken up into little chunks, and told in rotation. It became distracting after a while – I just wanted to get on with one story without being interrupted after just a couple of pages with another. 
Still, that’s often the nature of comics. And as always, there are some smaller stories with guest writers and illustrators appended at the end. I enjoyed all of these, and that’s saying something, since I usually find them pretty erratic in quality. And of course the art is uniformly outstanding.
Book purchased.