Shadow

Shadow
by Suzy Lee (2010)

         Shadow may be the first (mostly) wordless picture book I have ever read and I am glad it was my first. Lee creatively orients the book so that the reader is encouraged to flip pages from bottom to top. Using the seam between pages she creates two distinct worlds - the world of the girl's imagination and the real world. But the two world's meld and distort in the middle of the story and both worlds become imagined. Due to the orientation and style of the two worlds the book can also be read "upside down" to show a completely different perspective on the story. Lee beautifully uses black and white illustrations highlighted with yellow to show the morphing and changing worlds. I found myself flipping back and forth in the beginning pages seeing how a real world object in an attic morphed into a creature or a plant. The combination of artistic styles also draws reader attention to changes in the world. The mundane objects in the attic are drawn in a very simple way, so the girl herself drawn in bolder lines and the bold images of the imagined world come alive.
         In a classroom this book could be used for a number of different activities. Creative writing is the first type of activity that comes to mind, and can be adapted for any age group or for any language proficiency level. Writing a story around the visual one that Suzy Lee has created will open the floor for different interpretations but will also be differentiated automatically in terms of ability level because of the nature of the task. This type of activity could also be adapted for a group storytelling activity, where the class as a whole (or small groups) do an invented read aloud of the book. Students could also use the books prompt of imagined worlds to consider what their world would look like and where they would get the idea for certain parts of it (like the wolf in the girl's invented world that was inspired by a broken boot). Wordless books seem to inspire an abundance of creative lesson plans.