Holding onto tactile books
In the Jets-vs.-Sharks level tensions between ebooks and paper books, I remain annoyingly neutral; hey, as long as people are reading, right? Still, some books are meant to be tactile objects, the type that screens just can’t do justice.
Take Cybèle Young’s Some Things I’ve Lost (Groundwood books, 32 pp, ages 4–8, $20). Young is an artist whose paper sculptures have frequently found themselves at home in children’s books, but her remarkable creativity is especially on display in her latest work.
Flipping through for the first time, the book appears to be modest. Every page has a small photo of an object against a stark white background with a caption explaining how it was lost (“Object: Visor/Last seen: Front lawn — lemonade stand”). Yet each page also conceals a hidden flap: open it up, and watch as the object evolves, sprouting new life as it turns into elaborate new figure rendered in Japanese paper. The new figures are quasi-abstract, until the final page when they are placed together to form an underwater seascape. It’s a phenomenal exercise in visual storytelling. Brian Selznick, whose 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret earned both a Caldecott medal and a tepid film adaptation, is back with another powerhouse novel. The Marvels (Scholastic, 672 pp, ages 10 and up, $37) uses its first 400 pages to tell the story of the Marvel family, completely through wordless illustrations. In 1766, young Billy Marvel survives a shipwreck to find work at a theatre. The story then follows the life of Billy’s son, grandson, and their later generations, each one living a fantastical life in relation to the stage. The story then abruptly shifts, jumping ahead in time to the year 1990 and switching to prose, as the sweetly nerdy Joseph Jervis runs away from his boarding school to visit a reclusive uncle in London that he’s never before met. Immediate parallels spring up between the two narratives, but the ways in which they actually connect play out like a mystery. The book’s hefty size might intimidate younger readers, but Selznick dances through the story so swiftly in a way that feels like it ends much too soon.