An image of the outside of a screen door is the first page of this graphic novel.

It is not like any graphic novel I have seen before. As readers we turn the page, and enter this home of isolation in the depth of the 2020 Covid epidemic.

A family of five live in this house. There is a boy with a game controller in his hands, totally taken up with the screen in front of him, ignoring the outside world and all its horrors.

There is a mother glued to a television screen that is showing a non-stop roll of news about Covid, its victims and and stories. Among the Covid horror stories is another of a man named George Floyd who died at the hands of policemen. He couldn’t breathe.

There is a father, another victim of Covid, lying in his bed alone with a mask across his face – his coughing steals his energy and his breath, but not his smiles for his son.

His daughter is talking to her best friend, planning to join a protest about racism, the murder of a man who begged to just breath, and the injustices of their lives.

The narrator is a teenage boy watching the people he loves around him dealing with the year of 2020 in their own ways and the best way they know how.

Wow. This graphic novel packs a punch. It is presented as a notebook with an elastic that stretches from the back to a front as many notebooks do. Each page is lined paper, but with a painting or drawing over the lines.

Each page is a work of art, even the pages painted only black, as the narrator pauses for a break, or just to breathe.

The story of trying to take a breath while Covid 19 ravages the world, a man’s breath is stolen in an arrest, and another man struggles to fight Covid 19 himself, is a powerful one. I think we were all holding our breath in 2020, wondering when or even if things would return to normal, and knowing for many that was impossible.

The text is displayed in cut out words or sections of sentences glued among the striking art of this graphic novel.

Stunning.

Author – Jason Reynolds

Illustrator – Jason Griffin

Age – 12+

Graphic Novel

(2022, Allen & Unwin, Family, Historical, Bullies, Conflict, Racism, Crime, Murder, Love, USA, George Floyd, Protest, Covid 19, Pandemic, World-wide, Breathe, Masks, Cough, Illness, Sickness, Home Isolation, Graphic Novel, Art, Collaboration)