art

“Bea Wolf” by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

January 18, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: gift from a friend

An epic in graphic novel form, aimed at kids but with an adult level of detail and complexity. Divided into sections called fitts, full of sonorous alliteration, the book first introduces a few characters, then sets the background, then describes the conflict between the joyful kids in their treehouse hall and terrible Mr. Grindle who can cast the curse of adulthood with a single touch.

The art along with the story is dark and dramatic. The group of kids is drawn as a wonderful multi-cultural mix, and both boys and girls have agency and can be the king. Young children will love the story’s heaps of freely available candy and soda and games, safe from parental rules. It would be a fun book to read aloud.

Recommended to enjoy with kids!

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Day You Begin” by Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López

December 30, 2023 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Spanish title: El Día En Que Descubres Quién Eres! (The Day You Discover Who You Are!)

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

What a gorgeous, loving picture book. “There will be times when you walk into a room, and no one there is quite like you.” Full of colorful flowers and multi-cultural children, the illustrations contrast their inner liveliness with their feelings of disconnection at school.

On the cover, a brown-skinned girl with tightly curled hair emerges through a partly opened door that is marked like a ruler. Later, a Korean girl protects her “too strange” lunch from the other children’s stares at a cafeteria table that is also a ruler. A boy excluded from playground games leans against a tree drawn with ruler markings. When two of the children make friends, they swing from a tree drawn with bark.

Highly recommended for children who might not quite fit in, and for adults who remember that experience. It made me cry, both times I read through it, and I’m taking it right back to the Little Free Library for someone else to find.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe

February 2, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph

I was introduced to Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir pronouns) via eir lovely comic about folk dancing. Eir memoir is full of lively, beautifully drawn panels and naked honesty about the painful moments of growing up genderqueer.

Maia Kobabe shares the joyful moments as well, including er warm connection with er parents, sibling, neighbors, and friends. E explains that e felt a startling wave of joy on encountering the Spivak pronouns e/em/eir, and that’s why e uses them.

This came across to me as a book for adults, since it includes some sexually explicit drawings and discussion about a vibrator, etc. At the same time, Maia Kobabe says it is for genderqueer kids to see other people like them.

Maia Kobabe’s website includes a sample of Gender Queer.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Witches of Brooklyn: What the Hex?!” by Sophie Escabasse

December 5, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph

A playful graphic novel about witches in Brooklyn with an underlying message about building friendship through patience and conversation. The cast of characters is delightfully multi-racial, as is fitting for New York, and young Effie’s grandmothers are more notable for being witches than for being a couple. In fact their relationship is left a little vague, but they’re probably not just housemates.

The drawings of people are expressive and funny and the backgrounds are full of Brooklyn details.

I was just going to look at the first few pages, and got pulled into reading the whole thing. Recommended!

Available at Amazon.

“The Magic Fish” by Trung Le Nguyen

December 5, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph

What a lovely, powerful graphic novel. Tien is growing up in the US with Vietnamese immigrant parents. He speaks mostly English, and they speak mostly Vietnamese. It’s a close, loving family and they read fairy tales together when they have time. The graphic novel interweaves slant-wise takes on three familiar fairy tales with Tien’s adventures in high school and as he struggles to communicate important truths about himself to his parents.

The art is gorgeous. Fairy tale dresses are especially elaborate, and the end of the book contains notes on the time periods the dresses are drawn from. The one thing I found confusing is that something about the proportions of the characters made them look younger to me. Tien looked like a much younger child, and his mom looked like his teen older sister, even though the story communicates that Tien is in high school and his mom is in her 30s.

The love in the book makes me cry, along with the difficult times around immigration and grief, conveyed with kindness. Highly recommended!

Content notes: brief homophobia, not endorsed by the author, and fairy tale violence.

Available at bookshop.org.

“You Can Do All Things” by Kate Allan

September 16, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Drawings, Affirmations, and Mindfulness to Help with Anxiety and Depression

Recommended to me by: The Latest Kate tweet

I liked the image of the little hedgehog lying in autumn leaves saying, “Please try to be on your own side today,” so much that I immediately looked into Kate Allan’s books.

This is a small book, six inches square. Each chapter has brief interludes of text about the author’s experiences of anxiety and depression, followed by a generous number of pages starring a whimsical cute animal saying something encouraging. The chapter ends with three brief tools or coping mechanisms, like “Focus ONLY on what needs to be done TODAY,” followed by a few more encouraging animals.

I was doubtful about some of the sayings, like, “It’s all going to work out fine.” Err, maybe? The book is copyright 2018, so it doesn’t take a long-running global pandemic into account. Some hit closer to home, like the white silhouette of a cat with its back turned, saying, “Being lonely doesn’t mean you’re unloved.”

Some of the animals are fanciful or realistic cats and dogs. Some are mythical, like dragons or unicorns or a mix of different creatures. There is the occasional seasonal tree. There is only one drawing of a person, a young Black woman in a bathing suit saying, “There is no one I need to change for except myself.” In the author photo, Kate Allan appears to be white. I wish an editor had mentioned to her that it’s questionable to include a sole Black woman among images of animals, even if it’s well-meant.

From the introduction,

This is a guide I wrote to younger Kate, the person who hated herself and had no idea how to cope with what troubled her. I’ve included every strategy, affirmation, and coping skill that has gotten me through hard times, from slight worries about how well I’m doing, to incessant suicidal ideation.

Recommended if your brain lies to you regularly (depression or anxiety) and you don’t already know how to cope with that, and you don’t mind that the book assumes all your problems are internal rather than some of them being external, like a pandemic or systemic racism or runaway capitalism or all those at once.

Available at bookshop.org.