The Moving Memoir You Must Read (Plus, 6 Other New Favorites)
Real stories + real emotions + really beautiful writing = the
books that illuminate the lives of us all.
1 of 7
Rosalie Lightning
By Tom Hart
272 pages;
St. Martin's Press
Graphic memoirist Tom
Hart and his wife lost their daughter, Rosalie, when
she was just shy of her second birthday. Nothing had prepared
them—not that anything ever could have—for the morning
their bubbly, exuberant Rosalie simply wouldn't wake up in her crib. In haunting
black-and-white panels, sometimes with all-black backgrounds, Hart depicts the
staggering grief that he and his wife, Leela, cycled through: Disbelief,
nagging questions (Did Rosalie know she was leaving? Was the sudden
thunderstorm that night some kind of portent?), absentmindedness ("I
forget how to make coffee," says Tom) and raw pain. "My heart is a
blast site," his wife says. The power of this book comes from Tom and
Leela's unfiltered honesty, as well as their gradual willingness to allow the
light to trickle back in through the broken places. By far one of the most
moving books of 2016.
— Dawn Raffel
Published 03/22/2016