Perhaps not for everyone but an honest exploration of a personal subject.
Fourteen-year-old Recca details her experience of her parents’ divorce through a graphic medium.
Growing up middle class in Las Vegas, brown-haired Sophia had what looked like the perfect family. However, when she was 8, after loud and violent fights, her parents made an announcement of their imminent divorce. Sophia was heartbroken and candidly portrays her feelings both through her own words and illustrations by Kim and Leach (Click, 2018, etc.). Earlier praise from a teacher for her caring nature guides Sophia to patch her parents’ fractured relationship, and the outcome is exceptional: Her mother and father seemingly put their issues behind them and focus on successful co-parenting. Although the portrayal is authentically voiced, Sophia’s circumstance is unusual; not all young readers will be able to bridge the dissolution of their parents’ relationship so easily, potentially giving them false hope. The full-color art has moments of idiosyncrasy, with Sophia drawn to look disturbingly mature in close-up shots. Other panels show Sophia literally bisected by a line; even younger readers will be able to glean meaning from this. There is a quiet but continuous undercurrent of Christian faith throughout. Like Sophia’s family, nearly all persons depicted are white; the few scenes with any persons of color exist only in what appears to be a social services office.
Perhaps not for everyone but an honest exploration of a personal subject. (Graphic memoir. 7-12)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947378-00-1
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Zuiker Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many.
Young Raina is 9 when she throws up for the first time that she remembers, due to a stomach bug. Even a year later, when she is in fifth grade, she fears getting sick.
Raina begins having regular stomachaches that keep her home from school. She worries about sharing food with her friends and eating certain kinds of foods, afraid of getting sick or food poisoning. Raina’s mother enrolls her in therapy. At first Raina isn’t sure about seeing a therapist, but over time she develops healthy coping mechanisms to deal with her stress and anxiety. Her therapist helps her learn to ground herself and relax, and in turn she teaches her classmates for a school project. Amping up the green, wavy lines to evoke Raina’s nausea, Telgemeier brilliantly produces extremely accurate visual representations of stress and anxiety. Thought bubbles surround Raina in some panels, crowding her with anxious “what if”s, while in others her negative self-talk appears to be literally crushing her. Even as she copes with anxiety disorder and what is eventually diagnosed as mild irritable bowel syndrome, she experiences the typical stresses of school life, going from cheer to panic in the blink of an eye. Raina is white, and her classmates are diverse; one best friend is Korean American.
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many. (Graphic memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-545-85251-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
A painful and painfully recognizable tale of one girl’s struggle to make and keep “one good friend.” (author’s note)...
A truth-telling graphic memoir whose theme song could be Johnny Lee’s old country song “Lookin’ for Love in all the Wrong Places.”
Shannon, depicted in Pham’s clear, appealing panels as a redheaded white girl, starts kindergarten in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1979, and her story ends just before sixth grade. Desperately longing to be in “the group” at school, Shannon suffers persistent bullying, particularly from a mean girl, Jenny, which leads to chronic stomachaches, missing school, and doctor visits. Contemporary readers will recognize behaviors indicative of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the doctor calls it anxiety and tells Shannon to stop worrying. Instead of being a place of solace, home adds to Shannon’s stress. The middle child of five, she suffers abuse from her oldest sibling, Wendy, whom Pham often portrays as a fierce, gigantic bear and whom readers see their mother worrying about from the beginning. The protagonist’s faith (presented as generically Christian) surfaces overtly a few times but mostly seems to provide a moral compass for Shannon as she negotiates these complicated relationships. This episodic story sometimes sticks too close to the truth for comfort, but readers will appreciate Shannon’s fantastic imagination that lightens her tough journey toward courage and self-acceptance.
A painful and painfully recognizable tale of one girl’s struggle to make and keep “one good friend.” (author’s note) (Graphic memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62672-416-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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