엄청난 눈
By: Hyunmin Park
Publisher: Yellowpig, Korea, 2020 (Our edtition titled "So much snow", fromSourcebooks Jabberwocky, UK, 2022)
Format: Vertical, with fold-out
The Korean title of this book translates to So much snow . The fact that there is, indeed, a lot of snow, is quite obvious to the reader already when looking at the cover. The storyline is simple: two boys digs their way out of the buried house, plays in the snow, has a snowball fight and then builds an enourmous snowman. At the end of the book, they go back inside.
The real interest in this book does not lie in the actions that are taking place, but in how they are told. With 엄청난 눈, Huyanmin Park demonstrates a masterful understanding of the visual 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 format is square, so when it opens, it becomes long and narrow, perfect for gigantic snowmen and heaps of snow.
An example of Park's subtle storytelling techniques appears already at the beginning of the book. There is a double spread with two almost all-white pages. A tiny yellow door and a shovel in the bottom right corner are the only colors to find. At first, the placement of the door seems peculiar. The reading direction in modern Korean is from the left to the right, so the first impression is that it would make more sense to place the door in the right corner, and thus create space for someone to exit the door and move towards the right to start the story. But the door, or whoever will come out of it, is not the real start of the story - the snow is! With clever use of the white page as the snow, combined with the placement of the door, it is obvious that a) the house is completely buried and b) the snow is the star of this show.
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 clearly portrays feel their their joy of playing in the snow, while leaving the reader in awe of just how cleverly the story is told.
The 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.엄청난 눈 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.
