The Best Wordless Picture Books

What first got you interested in wordless picture books — books that are told entirely through the illustrations?

I’ve been working with picture books for many years, and I also enjoyed it when my own daughters were at the picture book stage. I found wordless pictures very surprising, which is the reaction that most readers might have. We are so used to having words to tell the story and help us understand what’s going on, that to suddenly be faced with a series of pictures that only make sense when we put the story together, I found that very intriguing. It’s exciting as well, because you can tell the story you want to tell — the lack of words makes the readers have to tell the story themselves.

And the story might be very different from one reader to the next?

Up to a point. The interpretation and some of the details of the story will be different, but it can’t be completely different because it is guided by the illustrations after all, so you can’t make something up that doesn’t fit. There is a narrative, it’s not completely non-existent.

What are the biggest differences in how readers engage with the story when there are no words?

I think it is the difference of having experience with looking at these books. An inexperienced reader will tend to go through the book really quickly, thinking, ‘This is easy, it hasn’t got any words so I can just make up the story, I can understand what’s going on because I can see the pictures.’ Then they come to a point when they realise that actually they missed something, it’s beginning to not make sense because they haven’t really looked carefully and closely at the images. So a more experienced reader will know that they have to go through a wordless picture book not only slowly but several times, in order to really pick up all the cues that the illustrator is giving us to construct the story. It’s not a construction that’s solely of the reader, it’s a co-construction. You are co-telling the story with the illustrator.

The author/illustrator David Wiesner has talked about wordless picture books being very empowering for children, because they collaborate in the storytelling process. Do you agree?

Yes, absolutely, I’ve seen that happen. If you leave the space open for the child reader to read the book to you and to tell you the story while you just help them with prompts like ‘I wonder what’s happening here’ or ‘tell me about this picture’, then they become that co-author together with the illustrator.

When faced with a wordless picture book, the reader has to work at it, but at the same time, it gives children that power to tell the story. It encourages them to ask questions, to imagine what the characters are thinking, to make predictions, to go back and see if those predictions were correct or if they need to refine some of their expectations. It really immerses them in the story.

Is that what you would call visual literacy? Can you explain that concept?

Visual literacy is the ability to make meaning from pictures, from images, but it’s not something that happens naturally. Of course, if you’re able to see, then you can make sense of the pictures. But if you really want to access deeper meanings and understand the elements that come into making that wordless picture book — including symbolic meanings, aesthetics and playfulness — you need to learn to look closely, but you also need to understand the effect of the illustrator’s choice of techniques and what they include, what they don’t include, so you need to pay attention to colour, to pattern, to perspective. To be able to read pictures is not something that we are taught to do in school, but we should be. Children are surrounded by images but they could get so much more out of them, and they could become so much more critical, if they had some elements of visual literacy taught to them, just like other types of literacies.

Let’s talk about your first wordless picture book recommendation, Wave by Suzy Lee, who has won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen award. You were on the jury, weren’t you?

Yes, it wasn’t too hard to decide to give her the prize, although there were other amazing illustrators, too.

Wave is about a little girl who goes to the ocean. She is quite cautious and keeps her distance from the wave but then she begins to interact with it, until it gets a bit too close for comfort and she gets rolled over by the wave, but ends up with a gift of shells that the wave has offered to her.

This book is a very good example in a wordless picture book of reading emotions in the characters, which allows you to understand a character’s motivations. By looking at not only the little girl’s face but also her body posture and the way she is leaning forward or leaning back, the gestures that she’s making — she sticks out her tongue at the wave — I think even a very young child would be able to identify those emotions and empathise with them, to read fear or shock or pleasure. When the girl is dancing in the waves, it’s an expression of joy that comes across so strongly. But interestingly, one could say the wave also has emotions. Suzy Lee is such a brilliant, talented illustrator that, at one point, the wave seems to have its own attitude towards the girl. It’s not an aggressive attitude, you can tell that it’s an invitation to play. Somehow, with brush strokes, she’s managed to convey water that is happy.

Wave is a very playful book. It’s part of a trilogy, isn’t it?

Yes, Mirror, Wave and Shadow are the three books that make up what Lee calls ‘The Border Trilogy’. They all have a little girl as a character who is playing with the other side of the page, literally, because Suzy Lee uses the gutter in a very clever way to separate the pages and to act as a border between reality and that other place of almost magic, which can be either shadows or the other little girl in the mirror. At some point, they come together. At the beginning, the girl and the wave are separated; in the end there is a continuum between the beach, the girl and the wave.

Your next pick is Sidewalk Flowers (also published as Footpath Flowers) by award-winning poet JonArno Lawson and award-winning illustrator Sydney Smith.

This is another apparently very simple story, of a little girl walking home with her father. He is very distracted and is just talking on his phone while she is noticing and picking up the flowers in the pavement, the little flowers that some people would call weeds. She’s being attentive as she walks, she notices the flowers and she also notices other things, like a dead bird, and she gives it a flower, and a homeless man, a dog… She starts distributing the flowers that she has collected, and as she does so, the pages change colour. They begin to go from black, white and grey to colourful. So she is illuminating, really, the places where she goes through these flowers. It’s about love and attention and caring for someone else and spending a little bit of time with a dog or looking at the bird. There’s also that self-love at the end where she puts a flower in her hair.

Everybody gets a flower, but she keeps a bit of kindness for herself as well.

Exactly. And the end papers change from just the flowers to her being in the flower field. All of those things, if you look at the book too quickly, you don’t notice, but there are many layers of meaning there. Not everyone will access all those layers, but they are there for the reader to explore.

Given that Sidewalk Flowers is a wordless picture book, it is perhaps surprising that it was created by a writer as well as an illustrator.

Yes. JonArno Lawson is a poet and he has his own books that are with words. He and the illustrator speak about that collaboration as almost illustrating a poem that doesn’t exist, but it is still a very poetic book.

The illustrator, Sydney Smith, won the Hans Christian Andersen award.

Yes, he won it last year. I was also on the jury last year, so you can see he is also one of my favourites.

Next up is the award-winning Migrants by Issa Watanabe.

So this is moving into slightly darker topics, and the book has a black background (as compared to Suzy Lee’s Wave, which is very much white). That is already setting the scene for what is going to be a difficult story, the story of people who have had to leave their place of origin for some reason, and are looking for a place to be. They are carrying all their belongings with them, but the journey is difficult, and at times it’s dangerous and death joins them.

You say “people”, but they are represented by animals.

Yes, they are symbolic people, all of them with different animal heads, which is to show diversity and not a particular group, I think. The presence of death, of the skeleton, is also quite striking. They don’t seem to be rejecting the figure, they seem to be accepting of it. It’s a death figure that’s very tender when the character with a rabbit face drowns in the boat crossing. It rides on a blue ibis, which is a symbol of regeneration and hope.

You mentioned the black background but it’s also a very colourful book — the colours are very striking against the black background.

And it becomes more colourful as it goes along. I think Migrants is a very good example of a wordless picture book, because it is very much about silence. Even if the book had words, there would be very few words; they seem to walk in silence and interact in silence.

But there are definitely bonds between the characters.

Yes, and that’s also very important. They are helping each other, they are caring for each other, they cook for everyone, they share what they have.

Let’s move on to your next recommendation, A Stone for Sascha by Aaron Becker, another award-winning book.

Aaron Becker is another author who publishes quite a lot of wordless picture books. His stories tend to be about journeys and going through slightly magical places. This one begins in a very familiar situation of the death of a family pet and the grief of the little girl. There is a page, all white with just her in the middle, which is very much an expression of her grief. But at the same time, it’s a book that attracts you because of the colours in the cover image. They’re unusual shades of blue, and then suddenly a gold that stands out. You begin to see how that gold colour has a particular place within the book, through the journey of this golden-coloured stone.

There’s an extraordinary amount to talk about with children in this book. The stone has travelled through space, been around with the dinosaurs, been used and reused in buildings and objects, travelled across times and cultures…

One image at the start shows a little girl facing the water. You can tell from how she’s very still and her expression of grief, and possibly of anger, when she’s remembering her dog. As she throws a normal stone into the water, there is a change of scene which takes us out into space and we see how a meteor evolves over time, through nature as well as humans, into the golden stone she finds in the ocean. The universe gives her back a gift that connects her with the story, including her own ancestors. Again, you can read the book very quickly and not notice the clues that show that some of the people in it were part of her own family history. It is about the material objects that connect us to each other over space and time.

We have come to your final pick, The Arrival by Shaun Tan. It has won a raft of awards and the author has won the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award as well as an Academy Award for best animated short film based on one of his books, The Lost Thing.

The Arrival was first published in 2006 and one of the amazing things about it is that although it’s been around for nearly twenty years, people are still writing about it and talking about it. It’s been done in plays in the theatre, I saw it with people using puppets, and it was a silent play by people using sign language. It has inspired a lot of different retellings — it’s a timeless book. It’s about migration, but this one very much has the faces of people. He was inspired by pictures of people who arrived in the United States, in Ellis Island.

He used photos from the late 19th and early 20th centuries to create the art, right?

Yes, early 20th century, and his own parents’ story. His father was Malaysian, I think, and came to Australia as a young man. The book shows the way that the story usually goes, where the father arrives first and tries to find work, and sends back enough money for his wife and daughter to join him. Then at the end, his daughter is now sort of settled, and she can help other people. Along the way, he encounters different stories of migration, of people who have had to flee from their place of origin because of — some of these are quite symbolic images — giants hoovering people up, or dragons.

Yes, there are fantasy elements in this story.

Absolutely, and I think that’s why it works, because if it was an identifiable place then it would be too specific, whereas this way it very much gives the space for people to fill their own stories in there, or the stories of people they know. It causes a lot of conversation among the children that I’ve looked at it with. ‘What’s going on? What are those strange places? What do these machines do? What kind of food is that?’ We’ve all had that experience of being strangers in a strange land where you don’t know what the food is or how to do certain things, you can’t read the language. That’s the other clever thing about this: the words that appear are in a language that doesn’t exist, that none of us can read.

The Arrival is quite long. Would it be more correct to call it a graphic novel than a wordless picture book?

Yes, although technically it’s not a graphic novel either. I would call it a visual narrative. It’s very much a thing of its own, a beautiful object that’s been made to look like an old photo album.

Among the books you picked there are some quite heavy topics, including grieving and migration. You clearly don’t believe in avoiding difficult topics in children’s books?

No, absolutely not. Of course, you have to know the group that you’re working with, and The Arrival is certainly not a book to be read with early years of primary school because it’s too long and complex, and wouldn’t really be of interest. But they could read Migrants at quite a young age, and that would open up the conversation. There is a scene there of a death, but it’s done so subtly, and that’s a topic that needs to be approached, too.

It’s so much fun trying to figure out what’s going on in these books. With Wave, for example, you can perform it, you can sing it. You can do so many things with these books — they are a joy to read. Visual literacy happens, but reading them is mainly about the pleasure of looking at beautiful pictures and telling a story.

Do you recommend wordless picture books to teachers who have, say, a class with mixed language proficiency levels or pupils with dyslexia?

Yes, I think they’re great for working with all sorts of diverse learners, for being inclusive in the reading. Nobody has the upper hand, because there are no words to be read. But teachers are also quite cautious about using wordless picture books sometimes, because they feel that the children are not learning traditional literacy. Often, the teachers don’t know how to work with the books. So while some teachers have embraced them, others still need to be convinced of all their potential.

Is there anything you would like to add about these books, or in general about reading wordless picture books?

Just how much I would recommend people look out for them. There are many, many wordless picture books now, and there are many that have won awards. Illustrators keep creating them, so I would invite people to enjoy them at any age and read them with others.

I would also like to add that these are books that we use with our students at university level. There are students who are going to be teachers, but also publishers and authors and others who work with media. We run two programmes on children’s literature, where we look at these books as well as other picture books to learn about visual literacy but also the illustrator’s craft. One of these programmes is the MEd in Children’s Literature and Literacies. Our students enjoy wordless picture books immensely and staff never get tired of looking at them again and again!