Echo
By: Gianluca Lopez & Vittorio Marcello
Publisher: Ambelebu, Italy, 2026
Format: Hardback
Shared Peace
How do we keep hope alive in a world filled with war, pollution and despair? The team behind Echo has a clear agenda: to carry a message of peace out into the world. Because silent books so easily cross borders of languages and cultures, they found creating one to be the perfect way of doing so.
The idea for Echo was born at the island of Lampedusa, outside the coast of Sicily. When life and love brought author Gianluca Lopez to the tiny island, he became eye-witness to the cruelty that was (and still is) happening at Europe's borders, and was devastated by what he saw. Luckily, Lampedusa also introduced him to silent books through the local silent book library. Echo lived as an idea in his head and heart for several years, until he decided to pair up with illustrator Vittorio Marcello and create this interactive book of peace.
Having an agenda behind a silent book is not always a great idea. Adults wanting to teach children a pre-set lesson might lead to the book becoming over-explicit, simplified or patronizing. Luckily, Echo aviods these pitfalls: the idea behind the book is carried out with subtlety, humor and respect, leaving a lot of room for the readers' own experiences and interpretations.
Echo's brightly colored cover sets the tone for a visual language that is closer to street art and comics than traditional picturebooks. This suits both the book and the message well. Marcello uses a variety of layouts to tell the story: some pages are full-sized, others divided into different patterns of panels. This variation create a good reading rythm.
The main storyline is simple: A young girl, frustrated with the world, sends out a peace sign in a bottle. The bottle lands in Brazil, where a football player adds his mark: The Brazilian flag with a football in the middle. The bottle keeps sailing: From Easter Island to New York City to the Operahouse in Sydney... Every finder of the bottle leave their unique symbol on its message. The symbols are very interesting, because while some are universal, others open for interesting discussions: What might this symbol mean?
After the bottle has visited several different countries and children, the authors spice it up: Suddenly, it is found by both sea monsters and aliens! A brilliant twist that adds a lot of humour to the reading. The book ends with the aliens beaming down the bottle from their spaceship to the girl that started the story.
One of my favourite parts of the book are all the "Easter eggs"/cultural references on offer. As all intravisual references, these make the reading extra fun if you know them - like the great wave of Hokusai or the Pokemon logo, national landmarks and more. All readers will discover both something that is well-known and something that feels exotic in this book (I was very excited to find a Norwegian flag-patterned fish!)
I find the use of the "message in a bottle" very interesting. In our digital age, it might seem like a very ineffective way of communicating. But in order to discover such a bottle, you have to let go of your screen, open your eyes, and interact with the world. It is impossible to know where the bottle will land next, which means that it might end up with someone you would never have thought to e-mail, very in tune with the ideals and ideas that laid the foundation for Echo.
The book comes with a beautiful, folded sheet called "Add your Echo", where the reader is invited to draw their own echo to the world. This would be a lovely project for a school class or youth group! With Echo, Lopez & Marcello has managed to create a meaningful silent book that is both fun and thought-provoking, and that cleverly demonstrates the possibilities of interacting and communicating through other means than written or spoken words.
