It’s not often a book comes along that is so full of wholesome, all-ages fun that you feel refreshed and inspired just by reading it, but If Found…Please Return to Elise Gravel is that book. Reproduced from the author’s grid-paper notebook doodles, this 2016 graphic novel from Québécoise illustrator Elise Gravel — The Cranky Ballerina, I Want a Monster! — received an English-language edition from Drawn + Quarterly this summer. Continue reading
Nearly two centuries ago, two great minds and distinguished individuals among the English rich collaborated to create and program the Analytical Engine: the world’s first mechanical computer. Although Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built during his lifetime, in Sydney Padua‘s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer, he and Ada Lovelace team up to build their wonderful machine and use it to improve British lives. Continue reading
Set against the backdrop of Japanese occupation,
Min Jin Lee‘s Pachinko tells an earnest and heartfelt saga that encompasses nearly 80 years in the lives of one family. The story follows Sunja, the daughter of a Korean innkeeper, who marries a virtual stranger after a love affair with an older man leaves her pregnant and adrift. What could devolve into either melodrama or tawdriness does neither, as Pachinko deftly examines the little generosities that even the worst among us are capable of. Continue reading
Tracking her rise from humble beginnings to acclaimed author and self-made anthropologist, Peter Bagge‘s Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story charts the life of the Harlem Renaissance’s most famous woman writer, fast-forwarding through her life in bold technicolor to give us the woman, the myth, the legend: Zora Neale Hurston. Continue reading
I’ve written a lot about the need for diversity in kidlit, and New Zealander illustrator Katie O’Neill‘s Princess Princess Ever After hits on all the right notes. Told through O’Neill’s vibrant depictions, this love story of two young princesses saving towns from monsters and fighting back against dark magic will delight readers of all ages. Continue reading