Combining their talents, this brother-sister team has created a compassionate account of life with their autistic brother, David, interspersing prose chapters with comics chapters to offer an unusual memoir. Judy was once an editor at Henry Holt, while Paul draws cartoons for the New Yorker. Their collective work in this book spans five decades, beginning with David's birth in 1948 and ending in the present (he now lives in a community for people with autism). Roughly chronological, Paul's comics and Judy's prose are carefully intertwined so that the writing and the art amplify each other. Judy describes her family as "a cup of human fruit cocktail dumped onto the top of the house, each piece different but all out of the same can." She recalls a road trip she and David took together: "David himself was a part of the country I needed to see." The visual concepts in Paul's comics reflect his close association with Art Spiegelman, as Maus-like devices and images erupt inside imaginative pages. Together, brother and sister have succeeded in making an innovative, intimate and poetic probe into the inner world of the autistic mind that many readers will find quite moving. Agent, Gail Hochman. (Jan.)
Forecast: Promoted with an author tour, this unique book could attract attention from diverse groups, including comics readers and the autistic support community. Paul is a well-known graphic novelist, renowned for his adaptation of Paul Auster's
City of Glass, and Judy's book publishing connections have attracted blurbs from Louise Erdrich and other literary luminaries.
