So Much Snow
By: Hyunmin Park
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, UK, 2022 (First published in Korea by Yellowpig i 2020)
Format: Vertical, with fold-out
"So much snow. It is starting to snow. I´ ve never seen the snow fall like this. There´s so much. So much snow!" This is the only text in "So much snow", printed on the first two pages. Like the use of text in so many other silent books, it is reduntant. The fact that there is, indeed, a LOT of snow, is quite obvious to the reader already at the cover, where cutouts are used to display a house completely covered in snow. Park uses the negative space, the white of the paper, as the snow. The only two other colors in the book are yellow and blue. The book shows two boys digging their way out of a buried house, playing in the snow, having a snowball fight and then building an enourmous snowman, to finally end up inside again. But the real interest in this book lies not in the actions themselves, but in how they are told. In "So much snow", Huyanmin Park demonstrates a masterful understanding of the visual and storytelling opportunities a silent book offers.
The book opens vertically, a use of format not uncommon to silent books, with Suzy Lee´s "Shadow" being maybe the most famous example. The book itself is square, so when it opens, it becomes long and narrow, perfect for gigantic snowmen and heaps of snow. On the second spread, after the pages with text, we see two almost completely white pages, with a tiny yellow door and a shovel in the bottom right corner. At first, the placement of the door might seem peculiar - why not place it to the left, where we start reading, and thus give the eyes space to move towards the right to start the story? My guess is that it is because it is not the door, or who/what will come out of it, that is the beginning of the story - the snow is! With his clever use of the white page as the snow, combined with the placement of the door, Park shows us that this door belongs to a house that is completely buried in enormous amounts of snow.
On the next page, we meet the story´s main characters, two children digging their way out of the snow. These two are not just the protagonists of the story, they also function as a measure of scale, a storytelling technique that is very effective. Look at the picture below, the tiny size of the characters clearly show the vastness of snow pictured. At one spread, we see the two children and an enourmous, yellow thing - what is this? It turns out to be the carrot nose of a gigantic snowman. At one point, Park uses a foldout to display the size of the snowman, but the next spread is even more effective (bottom picture of this page): the two children are made so tiny they are barely visible, telling the reader just how endless row of stairs down from the snowmans head is.
Before becoming an author, Park was an engineer, which might explain his creative and knowledgable way around scales and perspectives. He portrais the children in a way that make the reader feel their movements and share their joy of playing in the snow, and at the same time he leaves the reader in awe of just how cleverly the story is told.
The clever use of the white paper, using the reader´s imagination to literally "fill in the blanks", is very visibly inspired by the works of Bruno Munari and Remy Charlip, who uses the same storytelling technique in "Cappuccetto Bianco". Park acknowledges their work as important inspiration for his own.
For adults, snow often means lots of extra work and worries, like snow removing, traffic jams and slippery streets. But for children, snow is an exciting adventure. Because of the trust Park shows the readers imagination, the reader is given space to really participate actively in this adventure. "So much snow" is bound to be a winter favourite, making the reader feel she or he is immersed in the snowy world right alongside the playful children.
Want your own copy of this book? "So much snow" is the Readsilentbooks.com Advent giveawaybook. Every like and/or comment on the advent posts on our Instagram page in December is a ticket to the drawing made on December 24th!
