Summary Of The Book Club Assignment: El Deafo

Book Club Assignment: El Deafo The graphic novel that I chose for my book club reading assignment was El Deafo by Cece Bell. This book was about a rabbit named Cece that reflects the autobiographical upbringing of Cece Bell as a graphic novel. This book highlighted many of the obstacles that a person learning to adapt to life with limited hearing capabilities goes through. These challenges may include being misunderstood because of a lack of education, being excluded both accidentally and intentionally, trying out new activities, self-consciousness, trouble meeting new people, and helping people understand how to best communicate with them and to teach them how to be more aware and considerate of things they may not notice (Bell, 2014). Other

Furthermore, a lot of adults today know very little about the types of hearing loss and the differences between them, so having graphic novels like this that can appeal to both children and adults should become common reading material to begin to understand how to best include everyone. Some of the key audiences that El Deafo could be used by can include teachers with hard of hearing students in their classrooms, new parents, and k-12 students. After reading this book, I was curious about Cece Bell and her backstory that motivated her to write this graphic novel. In the ‘El Deafo- A Note from the Author’, Cece Bell talks about how her own upbringing inspired the story of ‘El Deafo’. She had 80-90% hearing loss by the time she was four and a half years old and was very self conscious about showing her phonic ear to people as she already felt different then most people her age and didn’t want to also look different then the rest which is depicted in the book. The idea that her superhero self “El Deafo” would proudly boast her phonic ear as part of her superhero equipment and stand up to annoying classmates became an outlet for what she wanted to do as a shy kid but was unable to at the