Owly & Wormy, Bright Lights and Starry Nights (review)

How on earth do any of us ever learn to read? Just consider the daunting number of checkpoints en route to Independent Reading. Hold the book right side up. Check. Advance the story by pulling the right-hand page to the left. Got it. Follow the words from left to right, top to bottom. Right-o. Internalize the concept that letters stand for sounds that form words. Yup. Memorize letters and sounds. Uh-huh. Decipher letters in a variety of fonts. Yes. Depending on who's at the pedagogical helm, hone phonetic or sight-reading skills. Whew. And now, perhaps worst of all, accept that there's only one correct way to do this. No more head pats for parroting back what an adult has read and reread to you. No beaming smiles for supplying your own creative story to go with the pictures. Who thought this was a good idea?

Happily, Andy Runton has entered the scene with an approach that eases the transition from passive picture book consumer to active pre-reader—a strategy that mitigates the discipline of reading with some welcome wiggle room for imagining your own script. With last year's Owly & Wormy, Friends All Aflutter (BCCB 3/11), Runton transformed his pocketbook-sized, black and white Owly graphic novels popular with upper elementary kids into full color, pint-sized adventures in picture-book trim suitable for an even younger audience. Not really wordless books in the tradition of David Wiesner or Arthur Geisert, whose ambiguities demand a fair amount of plot interpretation, Owly books adhere to an inarguable storyline and a set of broadly accepted textual conventions. Instead of words (save for a few onomatopoetic sound effects), Runton relies on comic-book-style word bubbles populated by pictures and symbols, most of which are part of our cognitive lexicon. A sudden idea is represented by the customary lightbulb (here wittily portrayed in the spiral shape of a compact fluorescent bulb); a red circle with a diagonal slash negates the picture it encompasses, and if accompanied by an exclamation mark, negates it emphatically indeed. The plot point is precise, but readers are at liberty to phrase the dialogue in a number of equally correct ways. A tearstained yellow frowny face with a question mark can reasonably be parsed as "What's wrong?" "Why are you sad?" or "What's making you cry?"

None of this clever nudging would be worth a second look if not in the service of a great story. Fortunately, the game is fully worth the candle that figures here as a prominent motif. Owly is planning for a perfect evening of stargazing, with his telescope and tripod, a deep sky in full astral display, and of course a good friend to share it with. Scared of the dark, Wormy balks, but Owly brings out lanterns and candles to ease his fears. Then there's the problem of the leaf cover at Owly's tree house, which impedes the view. Moving to a hilltop clearing should do the trick, but here comes the rain. The buddies take shelter in a cave, where weird sounds and spooky eyeballs send them scurrying back out into the night, losing the telescope in their rush. This dismal field trip finally turns around when amiable Owly musters the courage to retrieve his telescope and thereby meets the equally amiable bats who join them back on the hilltop. Wormy's not too keen on losing his comforting night lights, but with the candles snuffed, the whole crew of new friends are rewarded with a spectacular show of starlight.

Although no mini-science lesson—e.g., the butterfly life cycle in Aflutter—is embedded in this title (unless "Douse the ambient light" counts as an astronomy tip), readers will be quite happy to join Owly's ever-expanding circle of friends. They may even miss the fact that there's plenty of covert learning going on, as they become fluent with several punctuation marks, a host of standard symbols, and the rigor...