The Golden Hour

Guest review by Lorraine Chun

All too frequently we hear or read in the news about another shooting at a school, but rarely do we hear about its impact on students. The Golden Hour by Niki Smith addresses how an adolescent copes with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing his teacher gunned down.  This is a story about healing and resiliency, new friendships, and even young love.

Manuel Soto is a latchkey middle schooler whose mother puts in long hours as a nurse at a health facility.  He takes solace in his photography art work and is a loner at school with no friends and is by himself when he gets home. The story begins with a school administrator introducing a substitute teacher in the art class and Manuel begins having a panic attack as students ask if the regular teacher, Ms. Winstone, will be “ok” and are told that she will be back when she is “ready.”  Suddenly, Manuel is depicted as having a look of panic as he sits alone on a stool, huffing and puffing and is shown teetering on a rock, i.e., feeling isolated and having an out-of-body experience. The school administrator calls Manuel back to the present and assigns him to sit next to Sebastian and Caysha for a team project.  As they are discussing the project Manuel looks at the side door which is roped off. He begins to have another attack and the two students draw him back to the present.

Manuel begins to bond with Sebastian and Caysha as they work on the art project together and he learns about Ag Club and the students’ projects for the local county fair competition. Discovering he is tech savvy, Sebastian and Caysha rely on him to stabilize their Wi-Fi connections since they both live on farms. They learn, as the reader does, that Manuel had been with Ms. Winstone during the attack, and he was the student who saved her life by pulling the fire alarm after she was shot. Experiencing flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, and sometimes feeling detached or disconnected from his immediate surroundings, the illustrations were very on-point in showing how Manuel is feeling.  The author’s illustrations in depicting Manuel’s dreams about the incident, helps us understand what he witnessed and why he has panic attacks.  We learn that Manuel is seeing a therapist and successfully utilizes a photography passion whenever he is feeling disassociated or feeling a panic attack coming on by finding an anchor to focus on and gets grounded by using his phone to take pictures or uses his hands to frame a picture. There is a line in the book, “when the world feels unstable, find an anchor,” which in these times, may be very apropos. Throughout the book, Manuel uses this strategy when he is reminded of what he witnessed, whether it is triggered by gunshots during a video game or at camp when campers are shooting at the range. Friendship with Sebastian and Caysha helps him through some rough spots, and he goes the full mile to support them during the local farm competition.

There is a nice summary at the end of how a graphic novel is put together and the author illustrates the process from start to finish, which may be inspirational to budding graphic artists. The phrase, “The Golden Hour” refers to a special term in photography when the sky is red tinted at sunrise and sunset and Manuel captures that moment in his photography as anchor points. This book nicely covers the roles of school personnel, therapist, Manuel’s friends and their families, and how they support him and help him cope and heal in the recovery process from PTSD.

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Lorraine Chun is a medical librarian at the New York College of Podiatric Medicine. Librarianship is her second career after spending many years in public health administration. New to the field of graphic medicine, she finds that graphic medicine is a vital teaching tool to students of medicine.