Graphic Medicine
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Graphic Medicine Project: My Perfectly Imperfect Body and The Realities of Chronic Illnesses

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by Alaina Santiago My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung presents a graphic medicine memoir that dives into what it really means to live in a body that’s not cooperative. The story explores feelings of hardship, frustration, and what that experience looks like to the outside world. Similar to other graphic medicine works such as, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michaelangelo, and Me by Ellen Forney, The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Benjamin Bennett, MD  by Ian Williams, and Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 by MK Czerwiec, the strength of these individuals cannot be understood through… Read More

Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure & Escape from St. Hell: My Trans Teen Life Levels Up

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by Soph Myers-Kelley In addition to being traditional coming-of-age stories, Welcome to St. Hell and Escape from St. Hell centers Lewis Hancox’s experience recognizing he is different than his peers, coming out, and pursuing medical care as a transgender man. As a British high schooler, Lois Hancox (former name) was not out and proud about being transgender. Consequently, we witness conversations with the present-day author and his past self, trying to make sense of the mess of adolescence, high school, bullying, and not fitting in. Finding and being confident in yourself is hard for any teenager, but it’s doubly hard… Read More

The Joy of Snacking: A Graphic Memoir about Food, Love & Family

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by Annemarie Jutel   I bought The Joy of Snacking on a whim.  Without really checking out the story, I thumbed through it and liked the pictures.  Since I live so far away from the bookstore I thought I should snap it up while I was in town.  I haven’t regretted a thing.  The Joy of Snacking gave me hours of…yes, joy…as I followed artist, Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell in her conversation about her relationship to family and food. As a little girl, Hillary wouldn’t eat the same things as everyone else.  She was “picky.”  So picky, or at least so… Read More

My Perfectly Imperfect Body

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By Chloe Horning, Librarian Readers may be familiar with Debbie Tung from her earlier works of graphic autobiography. Book Love explores her love of reading. Quiet Girl in a Noisy World is about her experiences as an introvert. Her first foray into what we might call the Graphic Medicine space was Everything is Okay, a personal memoir of her struggles with anxiety and depression. My Perfectly Imperfect Body is a recounting of Debbie’s difficulties with disordered eating during her teen and early adult years. Tung’s visual style is gentle and soothing. Her figures are soft and rounded, with minimalistic features…. Read More

Precious Rubbish

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by Kevin Wolf Content Advisory: This book contains a fictional suicide, self-injury, alcohol use. The crisis Lifeline number in the U.S. and Canada is 988, in the U.K. it’s 999; and for elsewhere go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines. Content Advisory: This book includes domestic violence, rape, incest. National Domestic Violence Hotline in the United States is 800-799-7233; text 988; or use this weblink, https://www.thehotline.org/   Precious Rubbish is full of bad taste, out-of-place cartoony drawings seemingly from old comics, and a real-life horror story. This is a difficult review to write, because I’m not going to leave out (only) some horrors of… Read More

Puzzled – A Memoir about Growing Up with OCD

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by Soph Myers-Kelley Puzzled, by Pan Cooke, is the perfect introduction to OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) for a middle schooler who knows someone with the condition or is experiencing it themselves. In this graphic memoir, Cooke shares the story of when he first started noticing his own symptoms of OCD (though he didn’t know what to call it yet) and the multiple ways it showed up in his pre-teen and teenage life. Using the imagery of an unsolved jigsaw puzzle and puzzle pieces, Cooke shows how wrong life can feel for him until he completes a ritual the right way,… Read More