Starred Review The latest graphic-format book to come out of the Center for Cartoon Studies (which has done books on Satchel Paige, Harry Houdini, Amelia Earhart, and Henry David Thoreau) opens yet another fascinating page into history. The relationship between Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, is a well-documented and celebrated one: Sullivan, who was visually impaired herself, bridged the seemingly insurmountable communication gulf for the deaf and blind Keller. But it's one thing to know the story, and a whole other thing to actually experience it. In a brilliantly conceived and executed maneuver, Lambert uses a dynamic interplay between words and images to convey how someone could learn to communicate without access to either. In compact 16-panel grids that focus tightly on hands and faces, six-year-old spitfire Keller initially wanders through a blacked-out void, then struggles to interact with others and the nameless objects that surround her, and finally begins to make sense of the world as language takes root and allows her to know what distinguishes, say, a log from a branch or one color from another. At the same time, Lambert folds in the story of Sullivan's own anguished upbringing and provides a running commentary lifted from Sullivan's journals and letters, documenting both the severe setbacks and astounding breakthroughs she shared with Keller. The rest is history, but rarely is it presented in such a breathtaking, original, and empathetic fashion.

A silhouette of a child in a dark room opens this latest in the exemplary line of comic strip biographies from the Center for Cartoon Studies. Cartoonist Lambert employs these silhouettes to give a sense of how Keller's world might have felt from the inside--dim, bewildering, rageful, and, eventually, enlightened by language. Sullivan's own words convey her determination to teach Helen. Bib.

The story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan is given new life in an imaginative graphic novel. This volume from The Center for Cartoon Studies focuses on the trials both Annie and Helen struggle with in their lives. If Helen was a trial for her family and Annie over the years, she is literally put on trial at the Perkins Institution. The final third of the book is devoted to this "trial," not nearly as well known as the famous scene at the well, where Helen finally makes the mental connection that water is always water, whether in a cup, in a pitcher or running from a pump. Having gone on to learn to write, she is accused of plagiarizing her story "The Frost King," which was published in the Perkins Institution's alumni magazine. Interrogated for two hours, Helen was so devastated that she never wrote fiction again. The incident allows Lambert to go beyond the famous well scene to further explore the nature of words, language and ideas. "If your ideas don't come from teacher, where do they come from?" Helen's interrogators ask. It's a sophisticated, sometimes overly abstract, presentation, but the volume, like its predecessors, is visually appealing and daring. Helen's perspective is powerfully communicated in dialogue-free black panels in which she is represented as only a gray silhouette. A visual stunner that covers new ground. (panel discussions, bibliography, suggested reading) (Graphic nonfiction. 10-14)

Gr 6-8 The story of Sullivan, who was visually impaired herself, starts off with her in the Keller home wrestling with the difficult task of teaching the young blind and deaf child. As the story progresses, readers see the difficult times that Sullivan had as a child, losing family and becoming an orphan, and then being hired by the Kellers. None of these things is easy, but she finally breaks through to Helen and, as her understanding reaches new levels, she still has to deal with perceptions and expectations that others hold over both of them. Told from Sullivan's viewpoint, this color-filled graphic novel has many of the simple drawings blacked out with shapes or colored blobs to represent how she sees people and items. Much of the narration also comes from letters written to her old schoolmaster and is done in script. A wonderful resource for reports or interesting nonfiction reading, this graphic novel does a great job of describing how things were for the teacher and her pupil and the challenges they both faced. The book concludes with a four-page section that explains aspects of the various panels. Mariela Siegert, Westfield Middle School, Bloomingdale, IL