It is impossible to escape this story by browsing the American press: it is reported by all the major daily newspapers in the country.
Dillon Helbig, 8 years old, a little star. It all started in Idaho, in the small town of Boise, where Dillon, a student of “second grade”, the equivalent of CE1 in France, spends all his free time inventing stories and transcribing them into notebooks, illustrating them with his drawings. His last work: The Christmas Adventures of Dillon Helbig, which runs over 81 pages and tells the story of a child, in this case himself, who finds himself thrown into the past while he was making his Christmas tree, because of the explosion of a decoration star. The rest is a great journey through time and space, which Dillon wanted to share.
Dillon Helbig, 8, wrote a book that he wanted everyone to read. So he slipped his sole copy onto the shelves of his local library.
The book, a richly illustrated tale about traveling back in time after a Christmas tree star explodes, was a hit.https://t.co/O2R0YsYgl5 pic.twitter.com/NOrdoCiUGu
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 1, 2022
Having no TikTok or Instagram account, he thought of the municipal library, the one he has been going to every week since he was four years old. He took his notebook, headed for the section “illustrated books” and put it away among the others on a shelf. His grandmother, who accompanied him, did not notice anything.
The duo returns home and it is only two days later that the child entrusts the story to his mother. Both return to the library but the notebook is no longer there. And it was not thrown away, far from it: it was the department manager who found it, took it home and decided to read it to his 6-year-old son who loved it and talks about it funniest book he’s ever read.
After consultation with Dillon, the library therefore decided to include it in its collections, to assign it a reference and to allow users to borrow it. Today, the demand is such that it takes a year to get it!
The story propelled Dillon to stardom, from self-publishing whiz kid, interviewed everywhere from ABC to prestigious washington post and New York Times. One might wonder what motivates such enthusiasm, faced with a story a priori anecdotal.
But reading these major newspapers, one realizes that these days, in the United States, when the press talks about books, it is above all because certain conservative states like Tennessee and Texas are censoring more and more of them in libraries. The latest being the Pulitzer Prize Maus on the Holocaust, removed from the shelves of a college. And that’s probably why Dillon’s story is so successful: for the little touch of lightness it brings in these troubled times.