The Book of Denial

December 18, 2023
“This story is the worst story in the world,” warn Mexican writer Castañeda and graphic designer Macallanes in the opening pages of this eerie hybrid graphic narrative. An unseen boy peeks into the book his father is writing and is shocked to discover a chronicle of cruelty to children throughout history, from biblical stories of child sacrifices by the Canaanites and the massacre of the Holy Innocents to the medieval Children’s Crusade and modern-day abuse. “Children must know this story of terror,” the father whispers to the narrator’s mother, because “it belongs to them.” As the narrator comes to realize that these horrors are real history, and that his father is devastated by the task of recording them, he attempts to destroy the manuscript, then to revise it. The text winds around abstracted black-and-white illustrations: scattered pencil shavings, floating letters, an hourglass full of numbers, disjointed body parts. “How can you see letters without wanting to read them?” the narrator asks as he’s drawn again and again to the disturbing text. An artful blend of typography, photos, and illustration on each page pulls the reader in deeper, despite the oppressive air of menace: “Is there anyone more killable than a child?” This shocking, mournful record and darkly attractive art object is designed to haunt.

February 15, 2024
A boy attempts to rewrite the vicious history of violence toward children. In this innovative work by noted Mexican creators that's translated from Spanish, a boy who's read "many tales of terror--about monsters, the dead, ghosts, haunted houses" is drawn to secretly read the horror story his father is writing. He encounters passages that detail shocking, murderous brutality by adults toward children. The unnamed narrator at first wonders why his father would invent such tales, but newspaper clippings Pap� has saved describe acts of unspeakable cruelty from history: "I think now that I would prefer it if they were his own, if he had invented them, if these horror stories only ever happened inside his book." Mam� has a special letter she "unfolds from time to time to read until she cries." At school, the teacher describes the murder of the Holy Innocents, reassuring the class, "Don't worry, those things happened in the past." But our narrator, all too aware that history repeats itself, cries out, "Where was history when the children were murdered?" Later, seizing upon a solution, he adds "not" throughout his father's notebook: "These men...did not seize any infant they found with their two bare hands. Then, with those same naked hands, they did not put an end to them." The story propels readers inexorably toward its shocking climax. Striking black-and-white illustrations in a variety of styles, including photography and graphic design, frequently incorporate lines of text into the art and heighten the emotional impact. Unforgettable. (Illustrated fiction. 14-adult)

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