|  | Author: David Small
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
List Price: $24.95
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Seller: goHastings
Rating:  74 reviews
Sales Rank: 4779
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0393068579
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5409
EAN: 9780393068573
ASIN: 0393068579
Publication Date: September 8, 2009
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Showing reviews 26-30 of 74
 What a powerful memoir! October 19, 2009
B. Flatt
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is the second such memoir I have read--in this graphic novel style. It is truly amazing way to tell a story. This book kept me reading and reading. The only problem was I had to go to work or I would have spent the afternoon reading and reading until I read it all. I know I will reread the book over and over. I strongly recommend this book!
 Visual masterpiece, but for fans of the genre only October 17, 2009
Eric San Juan (Brick, NJ USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Stitches: A Memoir, is exactly what it purports to be. It is a memoir of the early life of artist David Small. And what a painful, emotionally scarring life it must have been. Small recounts a difficult childhood devoid of love, burdened by distracted and distant parents, and punctuated by a childhood cancer caused by his own father.
Alas, then, that Stitches doesn't quite hit the emotional buttons a story like this deserves to hit, because I *wanted* to feel drawn into this bleak (yet all too real) world more than I did.
This was certainly no fault of Small's grasp of the medium, which is excellent. His art has a loose simplicity about it, at times even a seeming sloppiness (undoubtedly deliberate), that is stark and vivid and entirely appropriate. His storytelling, which is so vital in the world of sequential art, is crisp and clear, and his compositions make excellent use of the page. Artistically, Stitches is a triumph.
The tale itself is unrelentingly bleak, with only a small glimmer of love late in the story of Small's early life. That's okay, though. It's not as if the reader doesn't know what he or she is in store for. We know we're about to be depressed.
Where Stitches falls just short of complete excellence is in the writing. While the art is simple and stylish in an impressionistic way, the writing is just simple, made up of direct, bare narration and equally direct dialogue. It often works well enough for the dialogue -- witness the mother's outburst on 226 and 277, which painfully underscores her loveless nature -- but the narration does little to add to the overall work. As a medium, comics excels when the words and images combine into a greater whole. In the best comics, theirs is a symbiotic relationship. That doesn't happen here. The narration feels almost superfluous, and thus distracting. Yet removing it would make Stitches an even lighter read than it already is. (Its 320 pages whip by FAST, even with a reader like me, who lingers on and absorbs each panel.)
The result? A reader kept at an emotional distance from the story.
However, Small makes excellent choices when it comes to allowing the visuals to tell the story, and he knows when to allow the imagery to get abstract. His instincts here are superb. Small's outstanding skills in this regard work hard to carry the weight of the emotional narrative here, and make up for any shortcomings in the writing.
I know many Amazon readers consider 3 stars a bad score, but let me be clear: It's not. Not to me. As far as I'm concerned, if you enjoy graphic literature and like memoirs, if you enjoy the genre in which Stitches dwells, it's worth a read. Small's visual work is impressive and the narrative has the potential to be powerful to certain readers. I may feel Stitches falls just short of its potential -- and it does -- but I'm glad to have read it.
Among the best October 16, 2009
L. Weaver (Alabama)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Gray is the appropriate hue for David Small's book since it conveys a bleak and lonely childhood. But wait. Don't let that stop you from reading it. There's more to this novel than the portrayal of a dysfunctional family. For one thing, there's no self-pitying or psycho-babble here. It's a painful story, yes--but there's a payoff for the reader as boy movingly journeys his way to independence, forgiveness and self-realization.
All that would be worth only so much if the book weren't also exquisitely packaged. So often a single silent image or a sequence of wordless images delivers more emotional power than many a memoir does in pages of text. David Small is an amazing visual artist.
Every new literary graphic novel, especially the memoir, seems to suffer comparison to the standard bearers. That needs to stop. The genre is growing and many new voices are appearing, so there's no need to bring up Maus or Persepolis or Blankets and discuss whether Stitches rises to their level of importance. David Small has achieved something powerful here that deserves high praise and recognition.
Threads and Fibers October 15, 2009
TastyBabySyndrome ("Daddy Dagon's Daycare" - Proud Sponsor of the Little Tendril Baseball Team, USA)
When I first heard about this book, I basically heard everything about it. That made me not want to piick it up at first, because I thought I had been given the heads-up on everything there was to know. Little did I know (or expect) that feeling to be wrong, and little did I expect myself to enjoy the mood of this book so much. It had a sense of foreboding and sadness in it, with the parents and the hidden things that are kept from our main character, and the way the main character feels has a contagious effect. When the sense of betrayal filled the pages, for instance, I felt like I was in that room as well and I felt like I could through those same mental stones. The same can be said for other feelings that went through the character - when something was felt, the book made that feeling real. That made it worth the read and it made it worth the time spent reading it.
Great writing, great read, good stuff.
It is really recommended.
Brutal and Poignant October 14, 2009
Bonnie Brody (Fairbanks, Alaska)
I'm not usually one to read graphic novels but 'Stitches' is in a category of its own. This memoir is a powerful and hard-hitting account of a boy's childhood in a dysfunctional family. The novel takes place in Detroit during the 1950's. David Small is the son of a doctor and a housewife. His mother's "silent fury was like a black tidal wave. Either you get out of the way, or......" His father's rage was taken out on a punching bag that he kept in the basement.
At nine years old, David is diagnosed with a growth on his neck. His family, complaining of money problems, waits three and half years to take care of it. While David waits to get his growth biopsied and diagnosed, his mother goes on shopping sprees for herself. Ironically (or tragically) his father, who is a radiologist, may have caused David's growth by using x-ray treatments on David to to 'cure' his sinuses.
At fourteen years of age, David is finally hospitalized for his growth. He will need a biopsy and subsequent surgery to remove it. As David rests in his hospital bed, his parents act nicer to him than they ever had, obviously hiding from him the seriousness of his condition. David wakes up from his surgery with only one vocal cord, no thyroid, and unable to make any sound but 'Ack'. "The fact that you now have no voice will define you from here on in. Like your fingerprints, the color of your eyes, your name." At home, everyone coils into themselves dealing with their own personal anger.
The visuals show David's horror at seeing his stitches and the scars from his surgery. He is also emotionally scarred when he finds out that he has cancer, a fact that his parents have been hiding from him. "Suddenly things began making sense: The necessity for two operations, the loss of my thyroid and vocal cord. Then, after the first surgery, my parents' weird attempts to rally and to play the role of a real family." Without a voice David feels invisible at school and at home. He becomes oppositional and skips school, going to movies instead. He also steals the family car one night.
David hears a screaming in his head and there is no place to hide from it. His family sends him to boarding school. He is kicked out and his family told to seek psychiatric care for him. Again, his family complains to him about all the money he is wasting.
David is a creative and anxious child. He has recurrent nightmares and envisions himself lost and helpless. As a child, David would pretend he was Alice from Wonderland and look down rabbit holes and become curiouser and curiouser. The leit motif of Alice in Wonderland is used again in the book when David sees a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist is portrayed as the white rabbit. As David comes to terms with his life and develops more insight about what is true, his time with the psychiatrist becomes a haven for him. Life begins to make sense.
Fairy tales and nightmares get mixed up in this book's poignant and powerful visions. Sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart. This is a novel about pain, lies and betrayal and finally, the freedom and struggles that truth brings. The drawings are bold, frightening and sometimes brutal, as are the lives that they portray. This is not a book for the faint of heart - - It is a book of both beauty and horror.
Showing reviews 26-30 of 74
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