The inspiring story of a blind boy so determined to read he invented his own alphabet.

     Louis Braille lost his sight at age five, but he was a clever boy and determined to live as others did. What he wanted more than anything else was to read and write. He went to the Royal School for the Blind in Paris, but there were no books he could read. At age twelve, he learned of the military’s use of “night writing.” It was a crude system of fingertip-read messages that was so difficult the other boys in school gave up trying to master it. But Louis persevered. Over the next three years he worked tirelessly to refine and improve the system until he had developed his own alphabet–using just six dots. At age fifteen, Louis had invented a system for reading and writing that is still used by the blind community across the world today.

Jen Bryant tells Braille’s inspiring story with a lively and immediate text. She wanted young readers to know what it felt like to be Louis Braille, and her text is filled with the sounds, the smells, and the touch of his world. And Boris Kulikov’s clever and amazing paintings help readers to understand what Louis lost, and what he was determined to gain back through books.