Book picks similar to
House of Sugar by Rebecca Kraatz


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Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth


Chris Ware - 2000
    It won the Guardian First Book Award 2001, the first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize.It is the tragic autobiography of an office dogsbody in Chicago who one day meets the father who abandoned him as a child. With a subtle, complex and moving story and the drawings that are as simple and original as they are strikingly beautiful, Jimmy Corrigan is a book unlike any other and certainly not to be missed.**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Mother Teresa's Advice for Jilted Lovers


Donna Barker - 2016
    Needless to say, Tara’s beginning to think she’s cursed when it comes to men. Her best friend, Betsy, who’s always there to put the pieces back together, convinces Tara she’s the cause of each of her boyfriend’s untimely exits to the other side. Could it be that Tara has that kind of psychic power? And is Betsy right that women all over the world would pay a pretty penny for it?What follows is a wild and humorous trek down the path of Tara’s spiritual growth and ultimate awakening. But the road to enlightenment is no cakewalk. It’s fraught with stacks of ill-gotten cash, death threats, and orange jumpsuits.

Love Fights, Vol. 1


Andi Watson - 2004
    For Jack, it's even worse. Where he lives, superheroes are a common sight, flying through the air and showing off their outrageous muscles in their skintight outfits. In comparison, a regular guy must seem boring and puny. So when he meets Nora in the midst of two steroid-cases beating the tar out of each other, he can't help but be a little giddy that she has agreed to go out with him. Too bad it's not that simple. Nora works for Expose, the leading magazine for superpowered trends. Chasing a scoop is a little more important to her than getting scooped off her feet, leaving Jack in the dust once again. To make matters worse, his cat, Guthrie, has gone missing, and though the feline will be returned to him—he's not going to be the same cat Jack remembers.

Harvey


Hervé Bouchard - 2009
    Everything changes and Harvey’s favorite movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man, suddenly begins to dominate his fantasy life. When relatives try to get him to look at his father in his coffin, Harvey finds himself disappearing.Brilliantly illustrated, emotionally true and devastatingly sad, this book is an artful and utterly convincing study of one boy’s response to great loss.

Photobooth: A Biography


Meags Fitzgerald - 2014
    In the last decade these machines have started to rapidly disappear, causing an eclectic group of individuals from around the world to come together and respond. Illustrator, writer and long-time photobooth lover, Meags Fitzgerald has chronicled this movement and the photobooth's fortuitous history in a graphic novel. Having traveled in North America, Europe and Australia, she's constructed a biography of the booth through the eyes of technicians, owners, collectors, artists and fanatics. Fitzgerald explores her own struggle with her relationship to these fleeting machines, while looking to the future.

Dear Julia


Brian Biggs - 2000
    Dear Julia, is the story of how he got there. Boyd's vivid memory of the past and shaky comprehension of the present give clues to the events that lead him to the edge: his childhood, his parents, and a particular trip to Tucson, Arizona where everything began to go terribly awry. Brian Biggs tells the tale with deft wit and a sharp eye, leaving crumbs both verbal and visual along the reader's path to the climactic end. Also available is the Dear Julia, short film directed by Alistair Banks Griffin.

7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga


David Alexander Robertson - 2012
    7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga includes the four graphic novels: Stone, Scars, Ends/Begins, and The Pact. Edwin is facing an uncertain future. Only by learning about his family's past--wars, the smallpox epidemic, a residential school--will he be able to face the present and embrace the future.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures


Phoebe Gloeckner - 2002
    I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness." So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescence, unsupervised and unguided, defenseless, and yet fearless.The story unfolds in the libertine atmosphere of the 1970s San Francisco, but the significance of Minnie's effort to understand herself and her world is universal. This is the story of an adolescent troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. The Diary of a Teenage Girl offers a searing comment on adult society as seen though the eyes of a young woman on the verge of joining it.In this unusual novel, artist and writer Phoebe Gloeckner presents a pivotal year in a girl's life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form.

Wally Gropius


Tim Hensley - 2010
    When the elder Thaddeus Gropius confronts Wally with the boilerplate plot ultimatum that he must marry "the saddest girl in the world" or be disinherited, a yarn unravels that is part screwball comedy and part unhinged parable on the lucrativeness of changing your identity.Hensley's dialogue is witty, lyrical, sampled, dada, and elliptical--all in the service of a very bizarre mystery. There's sex, violence, rock and roll, intrigue, and betrayal--all brought home in Hensley's truly inimitable style.Created during an era when another well-off "W" was stuffing the coffers of the morbidly solvent, Wally Gropius transforms futile daydreams and nightmares into the absurdity of capital.

The Spectral Engine


Ray Fawkes - 2013
    To glimpse the Spectral Engine is to face the moment of your own death. In Ray Fawkes’s stunning and brilliantly conceived new graphic novel, the Spectral Engine is the unearthly entity that brings together thirteen historically documented ghost stories – from across the country and throughout the centuries – to tell a timeless narrative of life, death, and redemption.  A ghostly white horse is a heartbreaking reminder of the clash between two warring First Nations tribes. Decades after the luxury ocean liner Empress of Ireland vanishes into the St. Lawrence River along with 1,012 souls, its wreckage continues to claim lives. A hunter’s encounter with the Wendigo of the North leaves him with a terrible hunger. A young escaped slave attempts to make the treacherous journey to freedom via the Underground Railroad. The triumphant completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway brings only tragedy to a Chinese railway worker. And in a poignant story of urban isolation, a young woman discovers that loneliness transcends death. By turns chilling and moving, this breathtaking book is a powerful reminder of the deeply human desire to be remembered.

Talking to Strangers: A Memoir of My Escape from a Cult


Marianne Boucher - 2020
    Where everyone is kind. Where you can be your truest self. It was the summer of 1980, and Marianne Boucher was ready to chase her figure skating dream. Fuelled by the desire to rise above her mundane high-school life, she sought a new adventure as a glamorous performer in L.A.And then a chance encounter on a California beach introduced her to a new group of people. People who shared her distrust of the status quo. People who seemed to value authenticity and compassion above all else. And they liked her. Not Marianne the performer, but Marianne the person.Soon, she'd abandoned school, her skating and, most dramatically, her family to live with her new friends and help them fulfill their mission of "saving the world." She believed that no sacrifice was too great to be there—and to live with real purpose. They were helping people, and they cared about her . . . didn't they?Talking to Strangers is the true story of Marianne Boucher's experiences in a cult, where she was subjected to sophisticated brainwashing techniques that took away her freedom, and took over her mind. Told in mesmerizing graphic memoir form, with vivid text and art alike, Marianne shares how she fell in with devotees of a frightening spiritual abuser, and how she eventually, painfully, pulled herself out.

Imagine Wanting Only This


Kristen Radtke - 2017
    Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. Along the way, we learn about her family and a rare genetic heart disease that has been passed down through generations, and revisit tragic events in America's past.A narrative that is at once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke's stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: Why are we here, and what will we leave behind?(With black-and-white illustrations throughout; part of the Pantheon Graphic Novel series)

Dancing After TEN


Vivian Chong - 2020
    As she was losing her sight, she put down as many drawings on paper as she could to document the experience. In Dancing After TEN, Chong teams up with cartoonist Georgia Webber — whose graphic autobiography, Dumb, chronicled her own disability — to trace her journey out of the darkness and into the spotlight. Chong now expresses her art through singing, stand-up, drumming, running, and dancing. This graphic novel is an inspirational tale and a powerful work of graphic medicine.

Good-Bye, Chunky Rice


Craig Thompson - 1999
    It was winnning a Harvey Award, no less. It documentates the once upon a time in our fishing village town and a short turtle lad name of Chunky, last name Rice.Mister Chunky Rice be living in the same rooming house likewise myself, only that boy be restless. Looking for something. And he puts hisself on my brother Chuck's ship and boats out to sea to find it. Only he be departin' from his bestest of all friends, his deer mouse, I mean, mouse deer chum Dandel.Now why in a whirl would someone leave beyond a buddy? Just what be that turtle lad searchings for? I said you best read the book to find out. Merle said, "Doot doot."

Tantrum


Jules Feiffer - 1979
    Having been two before, Leo demands his rights as a toddler: cuddling, cooing, tummy rubbing, and, most importantly, piggyback rides. In Leo's case, youth is definitely not wasted on the young. Feiffer has the uncanny ability to capture the frustrations of everyday life, while showing the lengths we'll go to escape from it.