The book is Wave, by Suzy Lee. It is a wordless picture book published by Chronicle in 2008. It is made of black ink and blue watercolour on white paper. It contains no text, not even on the cover, beyond the title and the author's name.
The child is Ondine Petrosino-Walsh, who lives in a one-bedroom flat on Mott Street in Lower Manhattan. She is eighteen months old. Her parents are a graphic designer and an oncology nurse who work opposite shifts so that one of them is always at home.
The book came into the house on Ondine's first birthday, as a gift from her father's sister, who works at the Brooklyn Public Library and has strong opinions about board books.
For the first six months Ondine ignored it. She preferred chunky board books with single objects on each page. Wave, with its long unfolding spreads of a girl and the sea, did not register as a book to her.
At sixteen months something changed. Ondine pulled Wave off the low shelf in the front room and brought it to her father. She put it in his lap. She climbed up. She turned the first page herself.
Her father, who had not read the book aloud before because the book has no words to read aloud, did not know what to do. He held the book. Ondine turned the pages. He watched.
She stopped on the spread where the girl first meets the wave. She put her small index finger on the wave. She made the small sound she had been making for water for about three weeks, which was wawa.
Her father said: Yes. Wave. Ondine said: wawa. She turned the page. The wave got bigger. She said it again, louder. She turned the page. The wave broke. She closed the book and opened it again from the start.
This is what eighteen-month-olds do with a wordless picture book, if the book is the right book. They make their own text. The text is small and repetitive and made of the words they have.
The book becomes a kind of canvas onto which the child paints her language. The adult does not have to read the book in any conventional sense. The adult only has to be present for the child's reading.
Ondine's mother, who came home that night and found Wave on the floor by the couch, asked Ondine to show her the book. Ondine did. The reading was different than the reading with her father had been. Ondine pointed at different things.
She had begun, with her mother, to track the seagulls. There are seagulls on most spreads in Wave, in the corners, watching. Ondine pointed at them and said bird, which was a word she had only had for about ten days.
Her mother said: Yes, those are the seagulls. Ondine said: bird. She moved her finger from one seagull to the next across the spread.
Over the next two months Ondine asked for Wave almost every night. The reading evolved. She added words. She added gestures. She began to act out the splash of the wave at the climax of the book by lifting both her arms and bringing them down.
She did not ever sit still through the book in the way she sat still through Goodnight Moon. Wave was an active book for her. She got up. She walked away. She came back. She turned pages backwards.
Her father, who began to read about wordless books after a few weeks of this, learned that Lee had designed the book to be read in either direction. The wave could be coming or going. The girl could be retreating or advancing. Ondine had figured this out without being told.
The book has now been part of Ondine's life for two months at the time of this writing. She is twenty months old. Her vocabulary has grown to about ninety words. Several of them, including wave, bird, splash, and foot, can be traced to spreads in Wave.
There is a temptation, with wordless books, to over-explain what they do. They have been studied. There is literature on them. They are credited with developing narrative skill, visual literacy, sequencing, and so on.
All of this may be true. But the more interesting thing, in a small flat on Mott Street with a small child on a couch, is the smaller thing. A wordless book gives a toddler a place to put her own language.
It is one of the few books in a young child's life where the child is making the text and the adult is following. The adult is the reader, in a sense, in every other book on the shelf. With Wave, Ondine is the reader.
She will outgrow it. She will move on to books with words, with longer stories, with characters whose names she will learn. Wave will retire to the bottom of the shelf, where the books of the earliest years live in most households.
But the small ceremony of an eighteen-month-old narrating her own first picture book, in her own small vocabulary, with her own pointing finger, is one of the quiet beginnings of a reading life. The book asked her for a text and she gave it one. That is most of what reading is.
