I read El Deafo, Cece Bell’s incredibly charming graphic-memoir about her childhood, in one day, and totally loved it. I laughed a lot, and kept interrupting my boyfriend to show him great pages, and there were a few places where I got a little teary-eyed. Bell’s art, which is rendered in vivid color by David Lasky, is really appealing to me: all her human characters are depicted as rabbits, and I love how Cece portrays herself, whether as a little rabbit in a polka-dotted bikini, or a slightly older little rabbit with a hearing aid; her alter-ego, the imagined superhero of the title, wears a red cape and is also great (you can see a page from the book in Katherine Bouton’s New York Times review of it).
So, the story: when Cece is four, she gets sick: it turns out to be meningitis. She recovers, but is “severely to profoundly” deaf, though she doesn’t fully realize it immediately. She gets a hearing aid (which is bulky, because this is 1976) and feels different because of it, a feeling that is amplified when she and her best friend go off to different schools. But Cece is pleasantly surprised: everyone else in her kindergarten class is also deaf or hard of hearing, and in addition to the usual kindergarten fare of reading and writing and math, Cece and her classmates start learning how to lip-read. After kindergarten, though, Cece’s family moves, and her new town’s school doesn’t have a program for deaf kids. So she gets an even bigger hearing aid called the Phonic Ear, which is paired with a microphone and transmitter that her teacher wears. It’s exciting to be able to hear well in class, but there’s something unexpected, too: Cece’s teacher doesn’t take the microphone off when she leaves the classroom, and Cece realizes she can hear her teacher anywhere the teacher goes in the building: the principal’s office, the teachers’ lounge, and even, awkwardly but humorously, the bathroom. Cece starts thinking of this as her secret superpower, which is cool, because she likes Batman. But she’s still concerned with her deafness as a marker of difference, and some of the book is about navigating that.
A lot of the book, though, is also just about navigating childhood: friendships and crushes and teachers and schoolwork. (The book covers the period from when Cece is four to when she’s in fifth grade.) Sometimes the trouble Cece has is related to her deafness—she has one friend who talks loudly and slowly to her, and can’t seem to stop even after Cece tells her it isn’t helpful; this friend also introduces Cece as her “deaf friend.” Or there’s a sleepover party where Cece gets really frustrated because her friends keep talking after they turn out the lights, and she can’t understand them because she obviously can’t lip-read in the dark. Or there’s the time when her mom signs them up for an ASL class, but Cece has no interest because she’s afraid that signing will make her even more visibly different than she already is. But lots of the things Cece deals with are the kinds of things hearing kids deal with too: a “best friend” who’s really bossy and possessive, a popular girl who tries to force a makeover on her even though Cece isn’t at all into makeup, a jerk at the bus stop who breaks a gift Cece got from her dad, and how tongue-tied she feels whenever she’s around the boy she has a crush on.
In her author’s note at the end of the book, Bell notes that some of El Deafo is fictionalized, and also makes it clear to readers that her experience of growing up deaf isn’t everyone’s experience: she talks a little about Deaf culture, and about her own shifts in thinking (as a kid, she saw her deafness as a disability; she no longer does). She notes that in making this book, she was most “interested in capturing the specific feelings [she] had as a kid with hearing loss,” and I think the book does that really well: it feels personal and honest and is really engaging.
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