Wave

​Suzy Lee is a Korean artist, known for her remarkable silent books. Her global breakthrough was with the three books now known as "The border triology": "Mirror" (2003), "Wave" (2008) and "Shadow" (2010). In order to tell her stories, she makes use of the whole book: not just the pages, but also the format and the binding. Suzy Lee has won a lot of prestigious awards, amongst them the H.C. Andersen award (which is like the Nobel prize for children´s literature) in 2022. As "Wave" is the most famous of Lee´s books, I choose to review it first.

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In "Wave" we meet a girl and an adult (her mother?) heading for the beach. We meet a group of five seagulls and a beautiful sea of waves, that at one point in the story almost takes on it´s own personality. While "Wave" might seem uncomplicated at first glance, it offers so much to interpret and explore.

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When "Wave" was published, Lee got questions about the use of the centerfold. Both reviewers and bookstores thought it might be a printing mistake in the picture below, where the girls hand "disappears" into the gutter of the book. It´s not. In her text explaining the work of the "Border"-books, Lee tells how she uses the gutter to create a narrative crossing, a symbol of the boundaries between reality and fantasy: The left side of the book can be read as the reality, the predictable world. The right side can be read as adventure, imagination, suprises. The girl first reaches carefully into the world of imagination, but on the next page she crosses the border. We see her playing in the water, showing pure joy and happiness. Then, something happens, the wave becomes threathening. The girl escapes to the other side, feeling safe, but surprise! In a glorius spread that is a big splash of water and waves the border is broken. After that, there is color on both pages. The sky is blue, so is the girls dress. Something is different. For is it really possible to cross the borders of reality and come back unaffected?

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Lee´s illustrations are brilliant. The girl, seagulls and her mother are portrayed in rough charcoal drawings, the wave in soft blue watercolor. It is so simple, yet so effective. She uses the long, narrow format perfectly - it folds out to be the long horizon of a seemingly endless beach, a long breath of summer and freedom. Every turn of the page reveals a full spread.

 

I love the fact that the mother is only present at the beginning and the end of the story. I think this is what makes the child feel so free to express herself, to experiment and to seek out danger. She can completely immerse herself in this experience because she is not being watched. The five sea gulls are like a Greek choir, both "commenting" on the action and driving it forward. The sea starts out as waves, but in the couple of spreads before the sea breakes the border, the waves seem to take on a life of their own. For me, they look like the leg of a giant octopus, many children read them as sea monsters or a sea dragon.​