One Boy

Set in motion by die cuts that open windows from page to page to reveal words within words, Laura Vaccaro Seeger's One Boy is a delightful book that revels in "that virtuality of any letter or phoneme to form semantic aggregates inaccessible to normal reading habits." Yeah. I can't help but wonder though as I'm reading with Sam how he's experiencing the linguistic behaviours the book examines. Sam recognizes the letter s and knows it's his "special letter." He knows it begins "Sam" and "Sarah" (a teacher at school) and makes a sssss sound. It's even seemed on a few occasions that he recognizes the visual manifestation of his name. It's fairly obvious though that he likely isn't able to "get" One Boy. So what, if anything, is he getting out of our readings?

I think, in some sense, what he's noticing is more important and more profound than the book's particular conceits. He's probably noting that the repeating shapes are combining and recombining in ways that prompt me to say certain things each time we open the book. That is, there's some connection between these combinations and what I'm saying. But, at the same time, they're still repeating shapes combining and recombining. Sam likely recognizes a code he has yet to decode, and yet he's still also likely somewhere near equally aware of the materiality of that code.

I'm a bit jealous imagining this.