More Words about Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People ed. by Perry Nodelman, Naomi Hamer, and Mavis Reimer

Reviewed by: More Words about Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People ed. by Perry Nodelman, Naomi Hamer, and Mavis Reimer Sarah F. Sahn (bio) More Words about Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People, edited by Perry Nodelman, Naomi Hamer, and Mavis Reimer. Routledge 2017. In his 1988 Words about Pictures, Perry Nodelman took a semiotic approach to studying picture books, exploring the complex dynamics of image and text in works that until then had primarily been assessed on their educational merit, when they were studied seriously at all. Thirty years later, More Words about Pictures takes account of the changes to the field—of scholarship and children's literature—since the publication of Nodelman's foundational study. "The essential quality of the picture-book form is its apparent simplicity," Nodelman writes in his introductory reflection to this follow-up volume. "But," he continues, "writers and illustrators who understand this form can use it to create marvels of intellectually and aesthetically rich storytelling" (10). In theoretically sophisticated essays drawn from papers presented at the Visual/Verbal Texts symposium in June 2013 at the University of Winnipeg for the 1988 book's twenty-fifth anniversary, the contributors bring Nodelman's approaches to bear—complicating, building on, and responding to them—on a variety of visual/verbal texts for young people, from graphic novels to apps and games and, of course, picture books. Coeditors Naomi Hamer and Mavis Reimer identify three major thematic and methodological strands of the volume's essays: semiotic and [End Page 221] structural approaches, new media studies, and material/performative analyses. Rather than grouping the essays along these lines, though, the book's organization seeks to draw out "less obvious intersections between arguments from various perspectives and approaches" (xv). The essays themselves blend approaches, moving through material and imaginative experiences of reading and interacting with visual and verbal texts for young people, from infant mastication in Lian Beveridge's "Chewing on Baby Books as a Form of Infant Literacy" (chapter 1) to the imaginative transport of reading a poetry imagetext in Andrea Schwenke Wyile's "Narrative Space in Sheree Fitch's Merry-Go-Day and Night Sky Wheel Ride" (chapter 10). This arrangement rewards the reader who moves through the book sequentially, but some readers may prefer to follow the thematic groupings laid out in the preface. There are several standout essays in this strong volume. Among these is Beveridge's "Chewing on Baby Books," which engages Nodelman's broad definition of infant reading practices. Given that everyone knows that babies chew on books, Beveridge writes, "it is curious that publishers do not seem to have produced books which use chewing as a good way to read them. The oversight, it seems to me, is a waste of a common and pleasurable infant reading experience" (21). The premise and tone of the essay are lighthearted, but Beveridge uses this amusing question as an entry into a serious exploration of what it means to read, what it means to read as or with an infant, and how pleasure, even the pleasure of infancy, gets positioned as shameful. "We simultaneously accept and disavow chewing," Beveridge writes, producing books that tolerate it and planning for the replacement of heavily-chewed books in public libraries; "We are positioned in a queer place of both knowing and not-knowing, acknowledging and not-acknowledging" (23). Book-biting is a queer practice, the pleasure of which makes adults uncomfortable but should be recognized "as a form of reading, or even as a form of literary appreciation" (25). Beveridge raises thought-provoking questions about the intersections of reading, pleasure, and its disavowal in childhood and beyond that readers interested in queer theory will be particularly keen to pursue. Chapters 2 and 3 take up art historical approaches to picture books. In "Six Degrees of Closeness in the Picture Book Experience," William Moebius explores the ways that the experience of art in museums and galleries, and art in picture books, converge and diverge. Both convey narratives, both invite closeness and create distance through physical space, and both take the reader/viewer through an experience...

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