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Round 1, Match 3: El Deafo vs The Family Romanov
JUDGE – ELIZABETH RUSCH |
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El Deafo by Cece Bell Abrams |
The Family Romanov by Candace Flemming Schwartz & Wade/Random House |
Shoot me now!
That was my first reaction when I was told I would have to choose between El Deafo by Cece Bell, a stunning graphic novel memoir about growing up with severe hearing loss, and The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia by Candace Fleming, a superb nonfiction narrative that brings a royal family and a hunk of Russian history to life.
The problem is not so much that the books are too different to compare, though they may seem so at first glance. El Deafo is a brightly colored comic with bunny characters and The Family Romanov is a serious, gripping historical narrative woven together from primary sources. But as a nonfiction writer myself, I immediately recognized what these two books really represent: the perfect form for fascinating true stories, almost perfectly executed.
I’m not particularly interested in aristocracy or Russian history but when I dove into The Family Romanov, I was immediately filled with admiration for the skill with which Candace Fleming introduces us to Nicholas (the boy who did not want to be Tsar), Alexandra (the cold beauty who becomes his wife and advisor) and their charming and spirited children, including their youngest, the hemophiliac son Alexei, heir to the throne.
Clearly written and accessible, Fleming’s rich use of primary source materials beautifully brings alive the daily routines, voices, experiences and quirks of the imperial family. Not surprisingly, the Romanovs drip with jewels and a sense of entitlement. But well-chosen quotations make the Romanovs’ humanity and their affection for each other leap off the page. The girls address the empress as “my sweety darling Mama;” Alexandra greets her husband with “My beloved, Soul of my soul;” and the Tsar calls his wife “Lovey-mine” and rejoices at the birth of his children with exclamations such as: “God, what happiness!”
Fleming also brilliantly paints a backdrop of the tumultuous world the Romanovs lived in but seemed not to know. I particularly appreciated the Beyond the Palace Walls sidebars (diary and journal entries from struggling Russians), which contrasted starkly with the ease and luxury of the Romanov’s life and highlighted the family’s isolation and their cluelessness to the plight of just about everyone else in Russia.
My one quibble with The Family Romanov comes halfway through, when Fleming only devotes a page and half (p. 79-80) to why the Tsar was known as Bloody Nicholas. The numbers are startling: In about a three year period, Nicholas’s police and soldiers round up more than 100,000 people, executing more than 20,000. For these few pages, we get a glimpse of Nicholas as a cruel, calculating dictator who wanted his people to “feel the whip.” Fleming writes: “Even children did not escape Nicholas’s terror. Police routinely rounded up workers’ children and beat them just to ‘teach them a lesson.’ “
The Tsar’s brutality and his delight in the butchery seemed uncharacteristic of the hapless family man Fleming shows us through most of the rest of the book. And since such ruthlessness was a major justification for the later slaughter of Nicholas and his family, I would have welcomed a deeper examination of this side of Nicholas.
Still, Fleming helps the reader feel the simmering resentment, the abject poverty, and the chaos of war-torn Russia. When these forces come to a boil and spur a revolution, I found myself completely swept up the story. Nicholas does little to fight back. After abdicating his throne, his whole family is placed under house arrest, and Nicholas “acts like school boy on vacation,” joking with his family about being an “ex-tsar.”
Tension builds as we see plans being laid for the family’s execution while the Romanovs remain clueless as ever. Though I knew how this story ended, I finished the last quarter of the book in one breathless sitting, reading in horror as Nicholas did nothing to address the revolution or to save his family.
In The Family Romanov, Candace Fleming offers two wonderful books in one—the intimate story of a fascinating royal family and the drama of the Russian revolution—both made stronger and more captivating by being woven together. It is a spectacular literary coup.
In that light, El Deafo should not stand a chance. Even though I’m a big fan of graphic novels and the author of one (Muddy Max), I couldn’t imagine how a graphic novel could compete with such virtuosity and sophistication.
But El Deafo grabbed me from very beginning. Cece Bell opens with one vivid, charming page on her childhood, with all the characters drawn as humanlike bunnies. Little Cece sinks into illness on page two, her song lyrics drooping off the page. A meningitis diagnosis comes on page three, and by page four, the dialog text begins to fade, literally, as Cece descends into deafness.
The small bunny/child asks questions and is answered with empty dialog bubbles. She’s 4, she can’t hear, she can’t read, and she doesn’t know what’s going on around her or why her whole world has gone quiet. Then Cece’s own speech bubbles empty. It’s a powerful, dramatic, visceral, moving introduction to Bell’s experience of becoming “severely to profoundly” deaf.
Graphic novels are a beautiful literary art form, a bit like picture books on steroids, where the marriage of the art and the words manages to make the whole so much more exquisite than the parts. Bell employs the form magnificently, so magnificently that while reading El Deafo, I felt as if someone were covering my ears, making me feel what it might be like to lose my hearing.
Through words and pictures, readers experience the challenges of lip-reading in dim light, at a distance, in a group. We see and feel what it’s like when a hearing aid battery dies in the middle of a conversation. (The words fade to nothing.) Bell even shows us why talking more slowly and loudly makes it harder, not easier, for someone with hearing loss to understand speech.
But Bell does more than give readers an experience of deafness. She explores the nature of power and the price of belonging through the Phonic Ear, which gives Cece the ability to track her teacher’s movements all around the school. And Bell layers into her memoir common challenges kids face, such as how to make, choose, and keep friends; what to do when a sleepover goes awry; and how to talk to a crush.
El Deafo is no doubt an extraordinary depiction of hearing loss. But it is also an insightful story about growing up and finding yourself that ultimately feels universal. Amazing.
So, now do you appreciate my problem? El Deafo and The Family Romanov are both absolutely brilliant books. (Read them!)
How could I ever choose? Put me blindfolded in front of a firing squad and I’d yell: El Deafo, No Romanov, No El Deafo, Romanov, El Deafo—
BAM!
I’m dead. I guess El Deafo wins.
May I rest in peace.
— Elizabeth Rusch
I mean, seriously, can anything stand up to El Deafo? Cece is just a regular girl, whatever that means. She wants to have friends – and, eventually, she finds friends who aren’t afraid of her superpowers. She gets through it herself, the hard way, and El Deafo relates both her frustration, sadness, and simple, kid-like joy. Both the pictures and the words convey so much with incredible nuance; young Cece had a hard time learning to express herself, but, boy, does Bell do it wonderfully. Still, Rusch had one of the hardest choices of the round – firing squad, indeed! Romanov was utterly fascinating, somehow telling the story of a time, place, but most of all a family. You understand the family’s complete separation from the revolutionary and violent Russia of the early 1900’s. You understand their luxury, their faith, their fears. Yet mostly, as one servant girl says, they’re just ordinary people: a family. Like Rusch, I do wish that Fleming had said more about Nicholas’s motivations for ordering and condoning the massacre of Russian citizens – but he seems to have completely naively believed that they deserved to die. That’s so completely foreign to us, and so is the world the Romanovs lived in. Somehow, we get to understand the family, just like we understand Cece in El Deafo. But even with such high competition, El Deafo fully deserves it.
– Kid Commentator RGN
The Family Romanov and El Deafo… I really feel sorry for Rusch; this is one of the harder matches of the round to judge. The Family Romanov was one of my favorite books in the competition this year, as it portrays the royal family of Russia in the 1900’s in both an impersonal and deeply intimate way, especially highlighted in the alternating accounts from the elite and from the peasants. Ironically enough, the ‘outsider looking in’ perspective from the peasants shed more light upon the family than the narrative of the family’s life, perhaps because the intrigue around their tale is largely based around the citizens of Russia at that time. I loved the book, mostly because of how complex and engaging Fleming made the characters, as truth, in this case, is stranger than fiction. El Deafo, on the other hand, is a playful yet poignant memoir that, just like Romanov, was ground for me that I hadn’t explored. The emotionally driven plot really added to the focus on the way we treat other people, deaf or otherwise. I have to say, graphic novels aren’t the first books I’ll pick up off the shelf. Going into it, in fact, I was more or less lukewarm about the idea of it, especially when I opened up the book to see bunnies somewhat resembling humans. The illustrations reminded me of the Oscars this year. There was one performance for Best Original Song called “Everything is Awesome” from The Lego Movie. I will admit, I had to mute the TV after about 5 seconds of it, but that’s what the illustrations in El Deafo felt like to me, albeit less extreme. Irritating, but a perfect embodiment of the plotline. Drawings aside, El Deafo, told through Cece’s childish and memorable voice made me both cry and laugh out loud. While Cece at first just wanted to be a normal kid, she gradually learned to accept who she was, as well as finding some cool perks of the situation. That outsider feeling may never have gone away for her, but she did, in my eyes, manage to overpower those feelings of inadequacy and oddness by surrounding herself with people who loved her just the way she was. Although the decision of who should win must have been extraordinarily hard, ultimately El Deafo was the better book of the two.
– Kid Commentator NS
THE WINNER OF ROUND 1 MATCH 3:
EL DEAFO
About Battle Commander
The Battle Commander is the nom de guerre for children’s literature enthusiasts Monica Edinger and Roxanne Hsu Feldman, fourth grade teacher and middle school librarian at the Dalton School in New York City and Jonathan Hunt, the County Schools Librarian at the San Diego County Office of Education. All three have served on the Newbery Committee as well as other book selection and award committees. They are also published authors of books, articles, and reviews in publications such as the New York Times, School Library Journal, and the Horn Book Magazine. You can find Monica at educating alice and on twitter as @medinger. Roxanne is at Fairrosa Cyber Library and on twitter as @fairrosa. Jonathan can be reached at hunt_yellow@yahoo.com.
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