Great books to read: Now with added pictures!

One of the most popular sections in our children’s area (aside from the train table, of course) is the graphic novel aisle. On busy weekends and in the after-school hours, we can barely move fast enough to keep up with the piles of graphic novels being returned and quickly checked out by the next eager young reader.

And they are EAGER. There’s a common misconception that graphic novels are somehow not “real” books, or that kids only go for them because they’re somehow easier. The reality is that kids go wild for graphic novels because they’re thrilling! They are dynamic, funny, fast-paced, scary, sad, relatable, engrossing – they are everything you can find in any other book, with the added delight (and challenge) of accompanying pictures.

The late Stan Lee put it perfectly: “If Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn’t be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?”

Graphic novels can be a great transitional step for readers, helping kids move from the simple pictures and pages of early readers to the more complex concepts found in in our juvenile (middle school) collection. But they can also be a great stopping point of their own! You can find just about anything in a graphic novel, from the comedic (Aaron Reynolds’ Fart Quest) to the classic (Zac Weinersmith’s retelling of Beowulf: Bea Wolf).

As Ms. Teri, Head of the Children’s Department, puts it, “The reading of a comic or graphic format is no simple exercise. It requires the reader to decode the text, study the images, and evaluate the meaning between the text and the images. Are the pictures suggesting a more complex story than the text is revealing? Is there more to the story than is being implied? Can the narrator be trusted? Reading a comic requires close scrutiny and discernment. Kudos to comics!”

If you have a struggling reader, a reluctant reader, or just a reader looking for something new — don’t skip the graphic novels! There’s more to be found there than could even be imagined. Wondering what all the fuss is about? Here are a couple of popular options to get you started:

Hilo