The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking. But I don’t want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that’s hugely important for everybody – we all gotta eat, and the vast majority…
The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition. And this is all true, as far as I can…
How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities – all things you don’t know well, all things new and different – what sparks the thought “that one”? This time, it was hair. On the cover of Time Under Tension , her major 2023 graphic memoir,…
Babies are hard. I think everyone knows that intellectually, but maybe not emotionally. My own first child was a needy, demanding, unhappy baby – I don’t want to claim too much; this was a quarter-century ago, and I wasn’t the main caregiver, either – so I have some insight but nothing like expertise. The mother…
First up, this is not non-fiction; there’s a disclaimer on the copyright page: “This book is a work of fiction inspired by actual events.” It does use the real names of all of the people involved, was written or co-written by the main character, and roughly follows the real history as far as I can…
There are people who can keep all of the Impressionists straight – who can even say which of those famous 19th century French painters are really Impressionists and which aren’t. They can quickly and easily explain the differences between Manet and Monet, have strong opinions on Renoir and Degas, and their minds contain at all…
We are all haunted by history, one way or another. For some, it’s personal; for others, it’s public. After the 20th century we had, for all too many it’s both, intertwined. Tessa Hulls is in her thirties, the second child of two first-generation immigrants to the US, brought up in a tiny Northern California town…
When I was a lad, the standard bio-for-young-people format was a small hardcover, heavily illustrated but written in prose, in short, punchy chapters and topping out at maybe a hundred and fifty pages. There were a lot of them: I recall shelves in classrooms and school libraries full of the things, some of them in…
There aren’t all that many books where the format is an inspired choice – most books are what they are, arranged in the same way as a thousand others much like them. Every so often, you see a novel in epic verse, or a non-fiction book of advocacy that’s basically one big infographic, but those…
A.J. Dungo obscures the central theme of his first graphic novel for a long time. The cover copy only hints at it. I have to assume that’s all on purpose. And, to be a fair reviewer, I feel like I should do the same. But know that In Waves is a true story, that it’s…
Superman’s incredible 85-year history is defined with intricate detail and unique understanding by those who’ve known him best – the authors, artists, filmmakers, actors and experts tasked with propagating his legend through every medium – in the latest Edward Gross omnibus, VOICES FROM KRYPTON, published by Nacelle Books. The hardcover book is now available via…
I used to personalize far too much when I read, to reflexively attribute ideas or thoughts in a book to the author. To blame the author, some times, for how I reacted to the book, or just hold them responsible for how I, or anyone, responded to a book. [1] I got better; I got…
