Jules Feiffer has this to say about the book and it relays my feelings exactly. I couldn't have said it any better, so why not leave it up to the experts:"Like the boy in this autobiographical novel my first reading of Stitches left me speechless. And in awe. 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. Spare in words, painful in pictures, Small, in a style of dry menace, draws us a boy's life that you wouldn't want to live but you can't put down. From its first line four pages in, "Mama had her little cough", we know that we are in the hands of a master."
Here is a trailer for the book - haunting and appropos. Takes me right back into this "movie" that David Small has created as a memoir of his life.
The graphic novels I have read and experienced have all been dark and gloomy and focus on trauma and social ills. Is this typical for graphic novels? Even the ones published for younger readers/viewers seem to have this feel to them.
The last one I read, Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies, takes the serious and ominous subject of cancer and relays the process of his mother dying of the horrible disease.
This book was cathartic for me and I cried throughout. The mother in the book looked just like my bald-headed, feeble 60 year old mother who experienced so many of the exact same things. I was awed that Fies could portray my own mother's experience and my family's through the visuals he used.
My next reading project will be to read more graphic novels for young people so as to determine if there are any/many that are more uplifting and "fun." I see such potential for developing visual skills from these texts but wouldn't necessarily want to expose young children to only the dark messages that many of them portray.
