El Deafo by Cece Bell
“Superheroes might be awesome, but they are also different.
And being different feels a lot like being alone.”
(Bell, 2014, p. 46)
***quasi-spoiler alert***
El Deafo by Cece Bell is a graphic novel about a young girl’s experience with hearing loss in early childhood and her life through elementary school.
We begin our journey with Cece, who at four years old was “a regular little kid” (Bell, p. 4). But on page 2, we are thrown into an illness with her and taken to a hospital, where we begin her healing journey. Recovery, home, and more doctor trips later, we realize something is different. At home, she loses her mom, calls out to her but she doesn’t respond, and can’t understand her Mom when she finds Cece. Something is different – Cece can’t hear her mom.
From this point on, we go with Cece and her parents to get hearing assistive technology and hearing aids. We go with Cece to her first day of school and follow her through elementary school. We are with Cece when she makes a first friend, then a second, then a third, and even when she is struck by her first crush. We learn what school feels like with adaptive technology in the 1970s – the physical experiences of hearing sensations and the emotional feelings of being different. We learn how she uses daydreaming and fantasy to escape and problem-solve at the same time. Through Cece’s imagination and creativity, a superhero is born – El Deafo! El Deafo allows Cece to do a trial run in addressing uncomfortable, embarrassing, and disastrous scenarios. As each new challenge arises, Cece imagines herself showing up as El Deafo with superpowers and standing up to friends and teachers, often saving the day. Wonderfully, Cece begins to integrate these solutions to struggles with relationships, deafness, schoolwork, and family in real ways.
El Deafo is recommended for children 7-10 years old, but I believe middle grades and even older adolescents would enjoy this book. If a young person enjoyed this book, I would encourage them to read other books by Cece Bell and steer them toward considering graphic novels. I believe this book would be an asset to classroom libraries for any upper elementary grade-level teacher, any English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR) in grades 4-10, reading intervention teachers, reading specialists and instructional coaches, and instructional specialists who work with adaptive technology.
The major strengths of the book are how real it is within the confines of anthropomorphic characters and high-quality art. Bell brings us through the challenges of childhood through the eyes of a child with hearing loss with one-sentence captions and speech balloons. The story is deep, thoughtful, relatable, and informative.
I absolutely love how Cece’s imagination is her unnamed superpower! We do not talk about creativity and problem-solving enough and this book is a great catalyst for that conversation. The book gives representation to children with hearing loss and children without hearing. It explains deafness to those of us who hear. I found myself over and over remembering what it was like to be a little girl and be pushed around by the only person who wanted to be friends with me or get in trouble for something that really wasn’t my fault. Bell does not hold back in making the conversations between the children words the children actually say. I cannot emphasize how realistic the childhood experiences in El Deafo are.
For me personally, El Deafo was so realistic that though I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I had to sit for a good 30 minutes afterward. Thankfully my stillness was interrupted by a call from a dear friend. Sensing something, she asked, “What’s going on?” All I could muster to say was, “Oh…you know...I just finished a book about somethings a little girl goes through and I kind of had to sit with it.” I just wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
“I will amaze everyone-”
(Bell, 2014, p. 45)
El Deafo by Cece Bell Blog Post by Sunny Stubbs, Personal reading time: 1:44:49, Personal blog writing time: 0:59:59
References
Bell, C. (2014). El Deafo. Amulet Books.
