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Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron review

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by Janet Chan Fans of Julia Quinn may be wondering why she is on a list of graphic medicine titles. Well, fear not dear readers, Ms. Quinn has not abandoned her signature romance genre. She has partnered with her sister, Violet Charles, to create the graphic novel, Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron, which is at heart a romance novel. What sets this graphic novel into the graphic medicine category are Ms. Butterworth’s adventures of being a survivor of a smallpox outbreak, provider of elder care, and medical detective. The story starts with the 1797 birth of Miss Butterworth in… Read More

In Limbo

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By Andrew Field       Trigger warning: suicide attempted. The amount of pressure teenagers feel to fit in, to meet expectations—academic, familial, social—is a narrative of impossibility and invisibility.  For this reason, teenagers are singularly vulnerable in our society and culture.  I know I experienced this. I struggled with depression as a teenager in high school, an endless sense that I did not fit in anywhere, that there was something wrong with me.  I felt unseen, unheard; and later that depression developed into a mental illness, schizoaffective disorder. Deb JJ Lee’s In Limbo is a book uniquely suited to discuss these issues… Read More

Ephemera: A Memoir

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by Tenli Yavneh   In Briana Loewinsohn’s graphic memoir Ephemera, we are drawn into the emotional world of a woman searching backward in time for memories of her mother, who died when the author was a child. The mother was mostly absent during Loewinsohn’s childhood due to mental health issues, eventually dying of a related cause, probably suicide, though the author does not state that explicitly. Loewinsohn was quite young when the events of the book took place, and her adult desire to make sense of her memories is portrayed in bookended sections around the core of her childhood story,… Read More