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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Adventure of Abbey Grange

I recently received a free trial from ABDO books of some of their online publications, and this was one of the titles I read.  It's a graphic novel of a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of Abbey Grange", one of the 56 original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir ArthurConan Doyle.

Since this is the story in graphic novel format,  it is re-told in a much shortened form.  I have read a lot of Sherlock Holmes' stories, and they generally have quite a lot of detail in them, although the reader is, of course, also forced to make a lot of conjecture to try and solve the story in the way Holmes does in his mind.  I felt this re-telling perhaps made the reader do even more than normal.

I enjoyed the GN format much more reading this book than I have in the past, and I think it was because I had just heard author Amber Keyser speak last week about graphic novels and did some work creating a lesson for teachers on how to read graphic novels.  I think my heightened awareness of the form helped me appreciate it more.  That makes me wonder if we shouldn't spend more time teaching this genre as it becomes more and more popular so we are sure our students are really getting all they can from it.

As always, Holmes solved it before I did, and I was quite surprised at the ending of this one, but not for the reasons you might think.  Now I'd like to go back and read the original to compare, but since I know the ending, I wonder how I'd like that...




1 comment:

Ms. Yingling said...

The thing I don't understand (and maybe this was Capstone) was the Playaways for graphic novels. I would find that VERY confusing. It's good you got trials-- these can be hard to judge.