A colorfully heartfelt evocation of thought and emotion.
A U.K.–based mixed-media illustrator offers a pictorial representation of her experiences with stress, anxiety, and depression.
Thapp creates a character portrait of a woman whose emotions she charts through six seasons, inspired by the “calendar used by some countries in South Asia.” Her protagonist is a nameless professional artist whose life and inner world she depicts through hand-drawn and computer-rendered illustrations arranged in single units or in multiple-unit tiles. She employs few words to render this portrait, and those she does use serve as descriptive captions or clarifiers to tie together sequences of images. In the first section, "High Summer,” Thapp represents the narrator’s carefree emotional phase with warm-colored images and symbols of life (blooming flowers, butterflies). “Summer is good to me,” she writes. “I am powered by a thousand suns. Charged with confidence—a fickle friend that only comes out to play in the sun.” In “Late Summer,” the author reveals the hyperactivity of the previous season giving way to "a worry of not making the most" of opportunities. Here, the colors are brighter and harsher, and an inner voice awakens to torment the narrator with doubts, especially about her productivity as an artist. “Monsoon” brings grayer images and a narrator who is more lethargic and isolated. She charts her continued struggle with the voice of doubt, increasing moodiness, and the "blue light" of depression through autumn and winter, which Thapp represents with subdued colors and striking images drawn on black backgrounds. The narrator eventually emerges from her "cocoon" of loneliness in "Spring" and begins to gradually add “color back into my days.” Though narratively spare, the woman narrator and the subject matter she tackles—the cyclicality of emotion—work together to create an engaging personal story that, through subtle symbolism, makes for a rewarding reading experience.
A colorfully heartfelt evocation of thought and emotion.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12975-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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