El Deafo

Bell, C. (2014).  El Deafo.  BY:  Abrams

At four years old, Cece got ill with meningitis and lost her hearing.  As she goes to school, she struggles with her friendships, her hearing aid, and her acceptance of it.  She did not like her Phonics Ear because it was a big box she had to wear.  She had many obstacles at school, especially with friends.  First, she has a bossy friend named Laura and she didn't know how to stand up to her, next she meets a girl who talks loud and slow to her name Ginny.  They got along great.  One day, she gets so annoyed she yells at her how she feels about her talking loudly and slow to her. Their friendship was the never the same after that. Then she meets a girl named Martha, who is a year younger than her.  She becomes great friends with her.  One day, they were playing tag and Cece ran into a tree branch and hurt her eye.  Martha felt guilty and avoided Cece from then on.  She finally realized that she had superpowers that no one else had with her Phonics Ear and things started looking up. She was able to hear everything the teacher was doing from going to the lounge to going to the bathroom.  She would imagine she was a superhero and called herself El Deafo.   She shared this power with her crush, Mike Miller.  She started using it while her teacher would step out of the classroom to warn the kids when she was coming back.  At the end, her and Martha become friends again.  I would suggest that readers from the ages 8 and up can read this book.  As an adult, I enjoyed reading this book and getting to know Cece through-out the book.  It had lots of humor, while telling a story a true story of how Cece Bell dealt with her struggles growing up deaf.  As teacher, we can teach students about self-acceptance and healthy relationships with their friends. A good follow-up book is Smile.   Cece Bell chose to write her memoir in a graphic novel style.  She used a character with long ears as the character in her story as a metaphor.  The themes of this book is acceptance and friendship, which the character had to deal with through-out the whole story.  She had to accept her hearing aid, how children would treat her different, and how life was more of a challenge for her.  It is written in the character’s point of view.  The sentence patterns were used to help readers understand what hearing loss feels like.  The use of fading and vivid colors and the structure and design of her thoughts helped them relay the way Cece was feeling at the moment.