Talk To My Back by Yamada Murasaki. Translated and with an afterword by Ryan Holmberg. Drawn & Quarterly, 2022. 9781770465633. This alt-manga was originally published in the early 1980s, and Holmberg’s essay at the back explains Murasaki’s place in the history of manga and more. But I’m recommending this book because it’s a good read, and once I started it I couldn’t put it down. It’s about a Japanese housewife struggling with her role in her family, the demands of her kids, and the way she’s taken for granted. Her response to her loneliness and isolation is to at times struggle against it and at other times to just accept it. She ultimately decides what she wants, finds a part-time job, and forces her husband to take care of their kids and their home sometimes. While it’s fun to watch him “suffer” in those moments, I valued this more as a meditation on marriage; it made me reflect on how cultural expectations continue to shape my life and the ways my wife and I ignore them. The art is marvelous, too — most panels use minimal details to set the scene in a way I really admire — and the pace feels much more realistic than most true-to-life manga I’ve read.

One Beautiful Spring Day by Jim Woodring. Fantagraphics, 2022. 9781683965558. 402pp. If you’ve never read a Frank book by Woodring this is the one to pick up. It’s a combination of material originally published as three books — Congress of Animals, Fran, and Poochytown — with an extra hundred pages around those stories, connecting and completing them. It is epic, plus it’s completely wordless, insanely weird, and somewhat gory and horrible in a way that I never quite recall. Frank and his friends remind me of classic cartoons, which are also often filled with suffering and awfulness in a way that’s both amusing and unreal and that I don’t really remember. Bonus: I can almost guarantee that the art will make you stop reading to admire individual lines in the a drawing at some point.  

Trees: An Illustrated Celebration by Kelsey Oseid. Ten Speed Press, 2023. 9781984859419. 160pp. I love seeing the world through Oseid’s paintings — she notices little details and then points them out via her paintings in a way that looks exactly correct and which makes me realize I need to pay more attention to everything. There is science in this book but it’s overwhelmed by the drawings: note just the anthropomorphized trees but also detailed images of leaves, flowers, fruit, bark, and cones. I love the unexpected paintings best: the Brazilian grapefruit with its bark covered in berries, the one showing crown shyness (this is when some trees maintain a distance from each other at the canopy), underground trees, the Ogham tree alphabet. Before reading this I had no idea monkey puzzle tree seeds were edible, nor the collective term for the acorns that fall in a season (mast). And I was surprised to learn that no one quite agrees on what a tree is, taxonomically speaking anyway. Includes an index. Trees is a great gift for readers young and old, and it’s the kind of book I wish I’d gotten instead of those classic National Geographic books for kids my grandparents gave me every Christmas. This deserves a spot in school libraries at all grade levels.

Guardian of Fukushima by Fabien Grolleau, illustrated by Ewen Blain. Foreward by Roland Kelts. Translated by Jenna Martin. Tokyopop, 2023. 9781427871367. Includes an interview with Grolleau and Blain plus information about and photos of Naoto Matsumura and the March 11, 2011, tsunami and its aftermath. When I saw Grolleau’s name on this book, I knew I had to read it — I loved his graphic novels on Audobon and Darwin, and the cover of this looked fantastic, with its sea dragon in the tsunami. This is artist Ewen Blain’s first book, and after seeing his bright, beautiful illustrations I’m reading any book he draws. This is the story of Naoto Matsumura, who refused to evacuate the area near the Fukushima nuclear plant so that he could care for the animals left behind. It contains a lot that clearly is true — details about Matsumura, his parents, and his nephew remaining in their home for days after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami until they were finally evacuated, and the problems that they faced thereafter, including that some family members didn’t want to take them in for fear of radioactive contamination. After the others are safe Matsumura returns to his home to care for his family’s animals, and others that he finds in the area as well. Japanese mythology is woven throughout the narrative; my favorite parts involve the origin of earthquakes and the heartbreaking moment when supernatural creatures appear to Matsumura to ask for his help, too. The book ends with Matsumura speaking out and demonstrating against nuclear power, along with a touching moment about an unexpected, personal result of what he’s been up to.

The Wolf Suit by Sid Sharp. Annick Press, 2022. 9781773217208. 126pp. with gorgeous endpapers. Bellwether Riggwelter (a sheep) seems perfectly happy being alone in his house until he hears a noise in the forest — a howling — and it scares him. Then he runs out of blackberries and goes off to pick more despite his fear. This does not go well. So he decides to use his crafting skills to make himself a wolf suit to wear when he’s in the forest. On his next foray into the woods, he meets some wolves, but then his disguise starts to unravel. Sharp’s fully painted graphic novel could be read to kids starting chapter books, and I think older kids would find it a quick, satisfying read, too. They took a lot of care with each illustration, small panels and two-page spreads alike, and the book is delightful. Its surprise ending is great, as is its message about pretending to be someone (or something) you’re not.

Alcatoe and the Turnip Child by Isaac Lenkiewicz. Flying Eye Books, 2022. 9781838740146. 61pp. Alcatoe (a witch) is the most reclusive inhabitant of Plum Woods, which is also home to ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and more. Stovetop, her kettle dog, keeps her company, and even makes tea when asked. One night during a full moon Alcatoe takes fresh jam buns to the Witches Social Club, where she and others will discuss the Annual Feast. The event is meant to smooth things over between the witches and non-witches after Alcatoe helped three kids beat an unpleasant local gardener, Mr. Pokeweed, in a vegetable pageant. Most of the book is the story of what happened after the kids sought Alcatoe’s help, of them finding the necessary ingredients for and dealing with the consequences of Alcatoe’s enchanted vegetable spell. This lovely book is a Halloween-ish tale without much of a sense of danger. I love Lenkiewicz’s illustrations, and the colors are a real standout, too. I think most kids who are starting to make their way through chapter books would enjoy it, as would older kids and parents.

The Honeybee by Kirsten Hall and Isabelle Arsenault. Little Simon, 2023. 9781665904841 (board book). 44pp. Hall’s mostly rhyming verse and Arsenault’s beautiful, charming drawings work together to create this compelling pageturner about bees! And as in excellent comics and picture books, the turning of pages is used to great effect. And the honey glows! (I gave this to my adult daughter as soon as I finished it.) 100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli by David Larochelle and Lian Cho. Dial Books, 2023. 9780525555445. 40pp. Dragons play, surf, take trains, get turned into things by a wizard, move to different states, fly off (sometimes in rockets), and more in this story that is a fun excuse to do a little addition and subtraction. Brilliant!   Bookstore Bunnies (Read To Read Pre-Level One) by Eric Seltzer, illustrated by Tom Disbury. Simon Spotlight, 2022. 9781665927932. 32pp. The bookstore bunnies are on the job, helping their animal customers get the books they want. There’s even a storytime! It’s a perfect read-aloud.  

Welcome to Feral: Little Town. Big Scares! by Mark Fearing. Holiday House, 2022. 9780823448654. Freya uses an abandoned storm cellar to get to the bottom of all of the weird stories in Feral. At the beginning of the book she’s adding a new incident to her map, the story of two kids who go into the city playground to ride the Spaghetti Death Twist slide even though it’s unsafe. As Freya tells us after the story, ” If you stand next to the slide at sunset and listen carefully…you can still hear them screaming.” The four other stories in the book involve an ice cream truck deep in the woods, a girl sent to detention for not completing her book report, a rocket-obsessed boy who restores an old bike, and a group of scouts whose adult leader is probably a vampire. Ghosts, tentacled monsters, and werewolves all make an appearance or two. I would have loved reading this graphic novel to my daughter when she was still young enough to be a little freaked out by it. There’s nothing too graphic, even in the one story where kids are clearly being consumed, and it will have a lot of shelf appeal for young horror readers. The simple layouts are used expertly, and the balance of text to images works to make the weirdness stand out.