I Talk Like a River

This book was perfect. On it's surface it's a simple story that in the hands of a lesser writers and illustrators would be trite or didactic. A boy with a stutter goes to school and can't talk; his dad picks him up from school, and seeing that he has had a bad day, takes him to the river to cheer him up. At the river, his father says, "You talk like a river" and that image cheers the boy up. The first thing that elevates this book is the language: rich, sumptuous, emotional language. Describing the way language causes him to stumble the boy says, "The M in moon dusts my lips with a magic that makes only mumble" and the juxtaposition of the way words fly through his mind and flow in the language of the book with his inability to speak makes the reader feel a frustration and hearbreak that mere descriptions of stuttering couldn't. The book has a rhythm... but it halts, then moves in quick bursts; it circles back on itself, it becomes slow, deliberate. The language of the book echoes the flow of the river, giving an aural understanding of what it means to "talk like a river" and a dignity to the comparison. The art in this book is phenomenal. Just like the text shows the way language shapes the boy's world, the imagery in the book mirrors the boy's internal perception of the world. In one scene where the boy is asked to speak in class and cannot make out the words, the paintings become blurred to the point of abstraction, and the loose shape of the classroom and the boy's laughing classmates appear only as haze. It strikes the reader both as if they are seeing the room through a scrim of the boy's tears, and also reinforces the way that his world is shaped by words and becomes immaterial when he cannot outwardly make the words that he shapes his world with. Near the end of the book the text says, "I look at the river. Bubbling, whirling, churning, and crashing". Their is no text on a two page spread of the boy silent and thinking. The spread can be opened to create a four page spread of the boy wading in the river, saying "My dad says I talk like a river." The river is beautiful, changing, dappled with light. The boy's figure is blurred at the edges, but he is not drowning, but standing still as the water (and the words that shape his world) surround him. I highly recommend.

This book is absolutely stunning. I love the message of accepting who you are and accepting that your disability is a part of who you are. The illustrations are beautiful and the words are incredibly powerful.