In Which I Have a Complicated Relationship with Graphic Novels

When you're a lover of books and your child has dyslexia, one of your greatest desires is for that child to learn to love books even though reading doesn't come naturally to his brain. Thankfully, I read enough to Squirrelboy when he was young that he already had a good relationship with books when we figured out in kindergarten that it would be a long, difficult road for him to learn to read them.

I gave him a pass on reading for pleasure or for the school reading log for a long time (I read to him instead), but eventually his skills were high enough that I really wanted him to start reading more on his own. He resisted the whole enterprise and vetoed almost every book I checked out of the library for him, until The Adventure of TinTin entered his life. I checked out a collection of these classic graphic novel adventures before a trip once, and Squirrelboy was enthralled.  He actually spent a large portion of the nearly 500 mile trip to Grandma and Grandpa's house reading and commented on how short it felt.

He ended up reading every single TinTin adventure written. I was hoping that at that point the fire of his love for reading would have ignited and he would move on to more traditional middle grade novels. He did have a long standing love for the I Survived series of books, but I couldn't interest him in anything else, and, even in the case of the I Survived series, he only wanted to read the book if the historical event referenced was of interest to him.

The next series of books that pulled him in was the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series, which I mentioned in my Halloween costume post last week. In contrast to his other favorite historical series, he did want to read all of these, whether or not he was familiar with and previously interested in the event that was the focus of the book. These books helped him fall in love with American history, and I was hoping he'd want to read other books about history because of that. In fact, my mom gave him an old series of children's books from her childhood covering many aspects of American history in narrative form. I've read a few of them. They're pretty good. Squirrelboy, however, has never even cracked the cover of a single volume.

Squirrelboy's other great love when it comes to series books has been the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. These aren't exactly graphic novels, but they're pretty darn close. Even now that Squirrelboy reads well, he still avoids reading traditional texts with the exception of an article about something that's of interest to him. However, he reads the Wimpy Kid books and his favorite graphic novels over and over again.

Kittygirl has also gotten on board the graphic novel bandwagon. She has always been an advanced reader. In first grade she was devouring books in the Whatever After series - middle grade novels written on a 4th grade level. However, about midway through second grade she decided she only liked books in the Owl Diaries series. This series is part of the Scholastic Branches line. They're basically a combination of early chapter books and graphic novels. She has since branched out to more traditional graphic novels, and is particularly fond of the autobiographical graphic novels of Raina Tegelmeier. She devoured Guts, the purple book in the picture, over the course of an hour yesterday.

I suppose I should be happy that my kids are reading at all. So many kids spend most or all of their weekend and after school hours playing on screens and never read a book unless they're forced to. The fact that there exists a selection of books my kids enjoy reading and an even larger selection the enjoy listening to should please me. However, the traditionalist in me will always be a little sad that they're not reading "real books." At Kittygirl's age I was devouring The Black Stallion series, and, at Squirrelboy's age, I had moved over to the grown up fantasy section as well as the horseracing based mysteries of Dick Francis.

There's one small way I can relate to them, however. When I was spending my senior year of high school in Sweden, I was initially not fluent enough in Swedish to read traditional books, and I didn't want to do all of my reading in English. So once a week after school I would go into town and buy a Kalle Anka comic. Kalle Anka is Donald Duck's Swedish name. I could usually figure out the words I knew from the pictures, or follow the story using the pictures even if I couldn't. It felt good to have something Swedish to read regularly, and I still treasure the Kalle Anka issues I have from that year. That's the closest I've come to understanding the feeling Squirrelboy must have had when he finally discovered TinTin and found a series that he liked and could read without being overwhelmed. The fact is, despite what we book snobs like to think, graphic novels ARE real books, and there's no reason people with or without dyslexia shouldn't be enjoying them.