By Cece Bell
A funny, true graphic memoir about growing up deaf, a giant hearing aid, and turning the thing that makes you different into a superpower.
Cece loses her hearing at four, after an illness, and starts school wearing a bulky hearing aid strapped to her chest with wires to her ears. It makes her feel like a spectacle. So she reinvents it: the device can hear the teacher all the way down the hall, even in the bathroom, which makes her a superhero, El Deafo. Underneath the jokes, what she really wants is one true friend who sees her, not her hearing aid.
This is the one that turns the trail funny, and that's a relief right about here. Cece Bell drew her own childhood, and she's hilarious about the stuff that actually stung: the giant device, the friends who talk too loud and too slow, the loneliness of being the only deaf child in the room. Your child laughs the whole way through and comes out understanding deafness from the inside, which no lecture could manage. The graphic-novel format also makes it the easiest real reading on the trail.