Welcome to my maiden voyage into the world of graphic novels. Don't get me wrong, I know what the research says about graphic novels (specifically, boys and graphic novels) and I certainly have chosen several of them to enhance my school library collection, but I've simply never wanted to read one myself.
Graphic novels are basically comic book-style books. They usually come in chapter books and are rich with illustrations. That feature, in addition to the chunking of text within subsections, is attractive to many reluctant readers. Which (not always) usually means boys. My graphic novel collection extends from Greek and Roman mythology to biographies of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington to plain old Spider Man and the Hulk.
Personally, I would not choose to read a graphic novel. I'm definitely a visual learner, but my brain gets nervous when trying to decide which frames and text bubbles to read next. I caution all my kiddos who select these types of books about this, and instruct them on the LEFT-RIGHT, TOP-DOWN strategy for interpreting text within a graphic novel.
But enough about graphic novels.
This one is about Anansi, who was the world's first spider and desired to own the world's stories so he could know the beginnings and the ends of all things. To do this, he had to capture 3 creatures and take them to the sky god. (Can you tell this is from the 389.2 section?). Through some classic fable drama, he accomplishes his goal and lessons are learned in the process. This one is short enough for a student to read in a few minutes, and move right along to something else.
Yeah, so the graphic novel thing is never going to be my bag, but there's always value in exploring something for the value of passing it along to someone who'll need it one day.
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