Inspiring and heartbreakingly timely.
Hogg relates her experience of surviving the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and her journey to becoming a gun control advocate.
This is a strong—and unfortunately relevant—addition to the publisher’s series of graphic treatments of contemporary social issues. Hogg tells her tale in a compelling voice, and the book begins with a page of arresting graphics, showing slender, then–high school freshman Hogg. She introduces herself and relates that she was on campus when 17 people died of bullet wounds on Valentine’s Day 2018. After revealing that two of her close friends died in the massacre, Hogg notes, “I lost my friends, but I found my calling.” A full page shows her and other students—fists in the air—beneath the slogan #NEVERAGAIN. Anecdotes about Hogg’s relationships with her mother, father, brother, and closest friends cleverly both inform readers about Hogg’s personality and foreshadow later incidents. In the midsection, Hogg relates her memories of the fateful day of the shooting. The images are appropriately gripping but never sensationalized. The final section covers grief, survivor guilt, and increasing empowerment—including students challenging the National Rifle Association. The use of “congressmen” for both male and female members of Congress is a startling regression, especially since Hogg is so politically aware. Hogg is white, and the diversity of her school community is represented in the illustrations.
Inspiring and heartbreakingly timely. (about the author, photographs, note for parents) (Graphic memoir. 10-14)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947378-21-6
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Zuiker Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
A fresh, insightful look at the crucial role young people played in the civil rights movement, though not without its flaws.
A compelling account of a group of young people who put their freedom and lives at risk as civil rights protesters.
In 1963, over 30 African-American girls between the ages of 11 and 16 were arrested for taking part in protests in Americus, Georgia. Unbeknownst to their families, the girls were taken to a Civil War–era stockade in Leesburg, Georgia, where they were confined for weeks in squalid conditions and subjected to inhumane treatment. Schwartz, who interviewed some of the women imprisoned in the stockade, offers a vivid, insightful look at their ordeal. Lack of toilet facilities forced the girls to relieve themselves in their sleeping space, which was nothing more than a stone floor. In addition to overwhelming filth and odor, the stockade was infested with flies, gnats, mosquitoes, and cockroaches. The barely edible food served to them sickened most. They did all they could to support one another and maintain a hopeful spirit, singing freedom songs and praying together. The ordeal makes for gripping reading, but unfortunately it is overwhelmed by the extensive background information on the civil rights movement presented in boxes and on separate pages throughout the account. While the attempt to provide this additional historical context is praiseworthy, it also interrupts the narrative flow and makes it difficult to get a sense of any of the girls as individual characters.
A fresh, insightful look at the crucial role young people played in the civil rights movement, though not without its flaws. (photos, timeline, source notes, glossary, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4677-8597-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
A reassuring picture of ever more stout defenses ranged against a scary, invisible world.
Medicine joins our immune systems in squaring off against microbial invaders.
Using what amounts to an anatomical holodeck, white-coated, olive-skinned Elena squires two dim-bulb bacilli, Bubonic Plague and Yellow Fever, through a thymus gland and other tissues while lecturing on the causes and treatments of infectious diseases and trying to enlist them as vaccines in the fight against their own deadly kind. Along the way readers come face to face—literally, as all the cells in the cartoon panels are anthropomorphic—with a large cast of common disease bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa on one side and on the other, six kinds of tough-guy leukocytes (“Git yer flu antibodies ready, y’all!”) the body produces in defense. In laying out a general history of plagues and medical advances, accompanied sometimes by thrillingly gruesome illustrations, Koch covers highlights and lows, such as how smallpox was used as a bioweapon in the French and Indian War, but avoids mention of the various means of transmission in the spread of HIV and leaves other STDs out of the picture entirely. Still, she injects heady doses of both history and histology into the tour, lightens the load with humor (of a sort: “Ha! Jenner put a lot of pus in that kid!”), and hints at promising new directions in medical research.
A reassuring picture of ever more stout defenses ranged against a scary, invisible world. (glossary, timeline, endnotes, bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62672-753-3
Page Count: 130
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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