An engaging memoir of one boy’s experience of growing up with ADHD with a risky message around medication cessation.
Page explores his childhood experiences with ADHD in this graphic memoir.
Young towheaded Tyler’s diagnosis of ADHD results in a prescription for Ritalin to help him behave, though it certainly doesn’t fix a dysfunctional family life marked by his father’s uncontrolled rage. In the 1980s and ’90s, when ADHD was poorly understood, recognition of Tyler’s neurodiversity is delayed because his schoolwork—when he completes it—is good. He struggles to keep friends and handle his anger, but the medication aids with focus. Despite his learning that Ritalin’s more likely to be associated with weight loss, Tyler blames his pubescent weight gain on both the drug and ADHD–fueled disordered eating, so the summer after 10th grade he stops taking it. Despite a two-sentence parenthetical that suddenly stopping Ritalin without consulting a doctor was unwise, adult-narrator Page clearly associates life changes he considers positive (growing taller, losing weight, becoming more social) with his self-prescribed medication change. The narrator describes the adult ADHD that will plague future Tyler, but the memoir closes with his happily leaving home after successfully graduating high school. Readers who pay more attention to Tyler’s story than to the interspersed scientific information and narrator’s asides will likely feel that self-treatment was the correct choice. Expressive cartoon-style art in bright, saturated colors and clear speech bubbles make this a visually enticing work.
An engaging memoir of one boy’s experience of growing up with ADHD with a risky message around medication cessation. (author's note, photographs, art notes) (Graphic memoir. 11-14)Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-75834-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
A “rad” alternative to less-inclusive albums, such as Cynthia Chin-Lee, Megan Halsey and Sean Addy’s Amelia to Zora (2005).
Rousing tributes to 26 women who didn’t keep their heads or voices down.
Reserving “X” for “the women whose names we don’t know,” Schatz presents an unusually diverse gallery of activists. Along with the predictable likes of the Grimke sisters, Billie Jean King and Zora Neale Hurston, it includes Patti Smith, blacklisted musical prodigy Hazel Scott, Mexican-American journalist Jovita Idar and transgender performance artist Kate Bornstein. Furthermore, the author extends her definition of “radical” beyond the arenas of politics and social causes to include Florence Griffith-Joyner (“Who showed us how to run like a girl”), Rachel Carson, Temple Grandin and Dr. Virginia Apgar (developer of the Apgar Score for newborns). The author closes with an above-average reading list and activity suggestions that include a pithy second alphabet of “things that you can do to be rad!” Readers will come away energized if not particularly informed by her enthusiastic but vague profiles (“Patti tried working at a regular job, and she tried going to college, but her creative dreams were too powerful to put on hold”). The combination of hair-fine type, bright, monochrome background colors, and stylized, high-contrast portraits at each entry’s head add up to an underground-'zine look overall.
A “rad” alternative to less-inclusive albums, such as Cynthia Chin-Lee, Megan Halsey and Sean Addy’s Amelia to Zora (2005). (websites) (Collective biography. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87286-683-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Budding engineers and inventors as well as students of American history will find plenty of food for both thought and...
Hands-on projects add interactive extras to this judicious portrait of the industrial giant as a brilliant but flawed genius.
Though biographies of Ford are as mass-produced as, well, Fords, this one will leave readers with a particularly strong impression of how complex, even enigmatic, a man he was. Carefully citing sources for quotes and facts, Reis offers frank discussions of Ford’s rabid anti-Semitism (seen as an outgrowth of the industrialist’s hatred for Wall Street bankers in general), labor issues, autocratic management style, and shoddy treatment of his son, Edsel. He balances these with more positive notes on his subject’s lifelong pacifism (in peacetime), largesse to cultural and social institutions, dedication to paying his workers a living wage, and willingness to hire women and people with disabilities. As is typical for volumes in the …For Kids series, the 21 interspersed projects vary widely in quality, from make-work activities like designing a flag and a badge to instructions for fixing a (bicycle) tire and step-by-step strategies for getting a ride in a real Model T to, most ambitiously, disassembling and reassembling “anything.” These are largely distractions, though, to what is chiefly a perceptive character study of one of this country’s most influential and iconic figures.
Budding engineers and inventors as well as students of American history will find plenty of food for both thought and reflection here. (period photos, bibliography, index) (Biography. 11-13)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-090-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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