Stitches

Starred review from August 10, 2009
In this profound and moving memoir, Small, an award-winning children's book illustrator, uses his drawings to depict the consciousness of a young boy. The story starts when the narrator is six years old and follows him into adulthood, with most of the story spent during his early adolescence. The youngest member of a silent and unhappy family, David is subjected to repeated x-rays to monitor sinus problems. When he develops cancer as a result of this procedure, he is operated on without being told what is wrong with him. The operation results in the loss of his voice, cutting him off even further from the world around him. Small's black and white pen and ink drawings are endlessly perceptive as they portray the layering of dream and imagination onto the real-life experiences of the young boy. Small's intuitive morphing of images, as with the terrible postsurgery scar on the main character's throat that becomes a dark staircase climbed by his mother, provide deep emotional echoes. Some understanding is gained as family secrets are unearthed, but for the most part David fends for himself in a family that is uncommunicative to a truly ghastly degree. Small tells his story with haunting subtlety and power.

Starred review from June 15, 2009
Emotionally raw, artistically compelling and psychologically devastating graphic memoir of childhood trauma.

An award-winning illustrator of children's books (That Book Woman, 2008, etc.), Small narrates this memoir from various perspectives of his boyhood in the 1950s. He considered his radiologist father one of the"soldiers of science, and their weapon was the X-ray…They were miraculous wonder rays that would cure anything." Or so it seemed to a young boy who realized early on that his family was what now would be labeled"dysfunctional." His mother was cold, neurotic and acquisitive, with little love for either her spouse or their children. His older brother had little use for or contact with his younger sibling. His father was barely a presence in the household. The author was chronically ill, with treatment prescribed by his father, including X-rays. When Small was ten, he developed a growth on his neck that his parents were too preoccupied to have diagnosed, though friends of the family urged them to. It wasn't until after he turned 14 that he finally underwent surgery for what was initially considered a harmless cyst but turned out to be a cancerous tumor. A second surgery left him with only one vocal cord, all but voiceless as well as disfigured. Terse and unsentimental throughout, the narration becomes even sparer once the author loses his voice, with page after wordless page filled with stark imagery. Yet the intensity of the artistry reveals how he has been screaming inside, with nightmares that never fully abate when he is awake. Psychological therapy helps him come to terms with his condition, as does his precocious artistry. While the existence of this suggests somewhat of a happy ending, the reader will find forgiving and forgetting as hard as the author has.

Graphic narrative at its most cathartic.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from July 15, 2009
"Stitches" refers to the clumsy sutures on 14-year-old David's neck after a cancer operation he wasn't supposed to know was canceran operation that renders him mute for a long time. More subtly, "stitches" could allude to how David's family members clumsily hold together their outwardly normal but unhappy lives: dad a stiff radiologist taking refuge in the liberal application of "healing" X-rays, mother a furious, cruel force, the cranky and feisty grandmother. Amidst enforced family silence about the parents' marriage and this unexpected handicap, a psychiatrist tells David a simple truth, freeing him to find his voice in art and, later, win awards for children's picture books. In fact, it's Small's art that lifts his memoir into the extraordinary. His seemingly simple black-and-white wash captures people, emotions, relationships, and plot subtleties with grace, precision, and a flawless sense of graphic narration. VERDICT In no way the latest ho-hum episode of "Dysfunctional Family Funnies, Stitches" is compelling, disturbing, yet surprisingly easy to read and more than meets the high standard set by the widely praised "Fun Home". With some sexual issues; highly recommended for older teens up.M.C.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2009
Gr 10 Up-Small is best known for his picture-book illustration. Here he tells the decidedly grim but far from unique story of his own childhood. Many teens will identify with the rigors of growing up in a household of angry silences, selfish parents, feelings of personal weakness, and secret lives. Small shows himself to be an excellent storyteller here, developing the cast of characters as they appeared to him during this period of his life, while ending with the reminder that his parents and brother probably had very different takes on these same events. The title derives from throat surgery Small underwent at 14, which left him, for several years, literally voiceless. Both the visual and rhetorical metaphors throughout will have high appeal to teen sensibilities. The shaded artwork, composed mostly of ink washes, is both evocative and beautifully detailed. A fine example of the growing genre of graphic-novel memoirs."Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2009
Prolific, Caldecott Medalwinning Small makes the leap to the graphic novel with a spare and unflinching memoir. Set on a black page, the haunting words I was six preface a scene of 1950s, soot-stained Detroit. Successive panels dolly slowly in on a boy sprawled out on the floor, drawing. Mama had her little cough breaks the reverie, and were off into the nightmare of Smalls upbringing, dominated by his mothers hateful silences and his physician fathers pipe-smoking impassivity. At 14, the boy goes in for minor throat surgery (which was secretly for the cancer his father gave him by subjecting him, as a baby, to X-rays) and wakes up maimed and effectively muted with a severed vocal cordan outcome made all the more devastating because it is so potently metaphoric of his family life. The suffocating silences of the household swell in grays and blacks with more nuance than lesser artists achieve with full rainbows of color, and Smalls stark lines and intricacies of facial expression obliterate the divide between simplicity and sophistication. Like other important graphic works it seems destined to sit besidethink no less than Mausthis is a frequently disturbing, pitch-black funny, ultimately cathartic story whose full impact can only be delivered in the comics medium, which keeps it palatable as it reinforces its appalling aspects. If theres any fight left in the argument that comics arent legitimate literature, this is just the thing to enlighten the naysayers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2014

Small's powerful memoir traces his life from childhood to adulthood but focuses on his teenage years, when a growth on his neck revealed not just an illness in David but severe failings on the part of his parents. In a work that's both deeply sad and cathartic, Small's heroism resides in his role as historian of the agonies of youth. (LJ 7/09)

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.