“Small’s linework is striking in its expressiveness and energy, figures and forms leaping across the page while eyes and lips simmer with emotion.” (from Kirkus Reviews)
The reviews are coming in; click on the links below to read what critics are saying. Then head over to your local bookstore to pick it up!
• What does Publishers Weekly have to say?
• Read this starred review from Kirkus Reviews
• And, this Booklist Advanced Review:
Small is undoubtedly revered as a prodigious picture book creator—a Caldecott Medal and Honor Book, among many other lauds, provide proof—while his graphic novels (Stitches, 2009; Home After Dark, 2018) remain notably rare.
His latest comprises three stories, thematically linked by “The Beast Within,” as Small titles his introduction. In “The Werewolf at Dusk,” a story by Lincoln Michel, an elderly man laments his youth as he (still) considers that strangers could be prey.
In “A Walk in the Old City,” Small plumbs a decades-old personal dream, featuring an aging psychiatrist who wanders into an arachnoid nightmare.
In the third—and most compelling—Small enhances Jean Ferry’s “The Tiger in Vogue” as he follows a “Mitläuffer, one who sees but walks along,” in 1920s Berlin, who witnesses violence, crime, animal torture, and even Hitler but chooses to silently return home to his own safety. Undoubtedly, a timely warning against complacent complicity seems contained within.
All throughout, Small’s fluid, emotive art is consistently wondrous, his characters’ expressions particularly, remarkably revealing. Shades of somber blue dominate his illustrations, pointedly enhanced with a haunting red in “Werewolf” and heightened with pastels—but also that warning red—in “Vogue.” Beasts indeed populate Small’s affecting pages, but most disturbing are the treacherous humans. — Terry Hong
