Speechless | Review

Speechless
Writer/artist: Aron Nels Steinke
Graphix/Scholastic; $24.99
Publisher’s rating: Grades 3-7

Mr. Wolf’s Class series cartoonist Aron Nels Steinke takes a break from anthropomorphic animals in Speechless, a standalone graphic novel starring honest to goodness human beings. It’s not the first time Steinke has drawn human characters; he illustrated the 2014 picture book The Zoo Box, starring a couple of kids. But it’s certainly been a while, and regular readers of his work might find the change interesting…in addition to a little unusual.

It will likely come as no surprise that Steinke can draw human people just as well as he can animal people, though, and the cartooning and storytelling in this new book are just as strong as in his Mr. Wolf books. Even the style is the same, despite that one rather drastic change regarding the type of characters. And, of course, he’s still working with young characters in a school setting.

The star of this book is middle-schooler Mira, who has a problem: She can’t talk at school. At all. It’s not that she doesn’t want to, or that she doesn’t try, she just can’t bring herself to do it and has never been able to. Because of this, many of her classmates think she’s mute.

It’s just at school, though; she’s fine at home, to the extent that her parents don’t even know about her problem. And it’s not like she has a problem expressing herself. A devoted and talented stop-motion filmmaker, she works her feelings out in the medium after school and sometimes posts funny videos that some of her classmates love, even though they don’t know she’s the one responsible for them.

She’ll eventually meet with a therapist, get a diagnosis (selective mutism), be assigned various exercises and practices to work on, and eventually learn some coping mechanisms to help her. In the meantime, though, she has other, more immediate problems.

For one, her former best friend turned enemy Chloe—who is also Mira’s mom’s best friend’s daughter—is coming to stay with them for a while. For another, Mira’s given a partner at school to work on a group project with, which obviously involves a lot of talking. That partner? Alex, who Mira kinda maybe might have a little bit of a crush on.

Being forced into both relationships will help Mira with her talking problem in the long run, as she gets to know —or in Chloe’s case, re-know—her classmates, share more of herself with them, and ultimately bring them into her private, inner world of stop-motion filmmaking.

While she hasn’t completely conquered her talking problem by book’s end, she has made enormous strides, overcome great difficulty and found people she can be herself with, people who understand, accept and, well, just plain like her.

It’s ultimately a pretty positive, even inspirational story, filled with the melodrama of preteen emotions and conflicts as well as plenty of humor, flavored by Steinke’s usual sharp eye for the world of school and the lives of the young people who go there. Fans of his will like it, and those encountering his work for the first time here will likely become fans.

As for how common Mira’s problem is, well, as Steinke himself tells readers in his afterword—presented as a comic rather than prose, with fifty precise little panels over just two pages—lots of kids experience anxiety, and lots of kids have trouble speaking at school, for lots of different reasons. He himself couldn’t always talk at school, he shares, though he never had a diagnosis or got help—although his problem wasn’t as severe as Mira’s.

It’s nice to hear where the inspiration for the book came from, and an even nicer reminder that people are different, have different problems and that we should be kind to them all.

Or, as Steinke’s own comics avatar says while giving a thumbs-up, “Just know that everybody is different, nobody is normal, but you are all awesome!” That’s a pretty good moral, and one he communicates just as effectively, if not quite as directly, throughout Speechless.

Filed under: Reviews