Another wonderful graphic novel/autobiography. It is the story of a young boy whose father gave him cancer from too many radiation treatments during childhood. He also is raised by a mother who teetered on the edge of madness and denied him medical treatment because of the cost or the bother.
I was so wrapped up in this book that I had to sit in my library after I closed it until I was finished reading it. It didn't take long, just an hour or so, but during that I time it had my rapt attention.
I've been thinking a lot about the power of pictures in conveying a story as I've been gathering information for a teacher to use with her creative writing class on graphic novels. Small, an award-winning illustrator, uses his images effectively to convey the horrors of his childhood and the healing that followed with a minimum of words. Jules Feiffer says of this author/illustrator: "David Small presents us with a profound and moving gift of graphic literature that has the look of a movie and reads like a poem...We know that we are in the hands of a master."
I highly recommend that you go and visit Small's web-page where he has a short 4 minute slide show about the book. It is very powerful and will give you a good feel for the book.
Highly recommend teen through adult. 5 stars.
I know that it seems like I love all the books that I read. That is not true, I just only feel like writing reviews for the books I like. I decided I couldn't write a review for another graphic novel I just completed that I really didn't like: Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell. This book, which seems like it should be just up my alley, was so confusing and hard to read that I would give it only a one-star rating. It's that bad.
ReplyDeleteSee. I can say bad things about books.