4.5 ster

Silent Days, Silent Dreams is the story of James Castle, artist (1899-1977, Idaho), who was born deaf, mute, autistic and probably dyslexic. With all his disabilities he lived his life in oppression, hardly cared for, bullied and terribly lonely. He was unable to speak, read or write and didn't at all understand the people that surrounded him, found them very frightening too. Well they were frightening and in a way I found them just as disabled, in the way that they just didn't seem able to understand him just one little bit and not even seem to try. James did have one passion and that was drawing, though his family and school did everything to discourage it. Put away on an attic with only a mattress on the bare floor he created his own paper friends and paper dreams and drew himself a bed, a little house and a window.

The book is written for age 10 and up, somewhere in a style midst a picture book and a graphic novel. Allen Say, author and illustrator, drew the story of James Castle's life just lovely, he used different materials and styles all accentuating the story he tells. The first time he saw the art of James Castle he was blown away, he thought it was startling, vivid, touching and totally unique. Not educated at all and living his lonely life James Castle had only one wish and that was to create. Without any real drawing materials, they had taken them all away to try to force him to develop other skills, he still developed his own unique way of creating. In order to survive he just needed to create and he did, he used every bit of scrap paper he could get hold of, used soot and spit to draw and made little dolls of cardboard, wastepaper and thread. He created endlessly, tied all the scrap paper drawings together to little books, and piled them up in the abandoned chicken house he lived in for 30 years. About 15,000 artworks of him survived, probably only 1/3 of what he had created.

To draw this story Allen Say did a lot of research. In order to tell the story of James Castle he tried to see and feel young James's silent world through his eyes. Making this book he experienced and used a lot of the techniques James did and while I was searching the internet to have a look at the original artwork I really thought he succeeded in doing so. All has resulted in this beautiful gripping book for which he got this years Schneider's Family Book Award. Although the story is quite depressing, it does have a happy end, the last 15 years of James's life he could live the life he always wanted in his own Dream House, a two-room mobile home.