Okchundang Candy

A child’s unconditional love for their tender, quirky grandparents pivots into a bittersweet coming-of-age narrative in Go’s delicate and raw autobiographical tale. The bespectacled narrator spends school vacations at their grandparents’ home where simple pleasures—sitting in front of a fan, eating watermelon—prevail. Observing Grandfather’s gentleness toward his small, shy wife, the child recalls, “I think I loved watching my grandparents being so sweet to each other because my own parents were so busy fighting back home.” Grandfather’s premature death of lung cancer prompts Grandma to withdraw emotionally; the now-older narrator tries to take his place, eventually witnessing the physical manifestations of her declining health. Crisp-edged cartoon-style illustrations rendered with loose pencil sketches give the work a handmade feel that parallels the tone of events: full pages of a sunny, colored-pencil childhood darken to smudged graphite comic-strip panels as Grandma’s health worsens. Go’s focus on scatological details, such as the couples’ toilet paper rule of “two squares for pee, three for poop,” presages Grandma’s later incontinence, which is handled with compassion by her grandchild. It’s a meditative graphic novel that twines the joys of living and the pain of loss into one indistinguishable braid. All characters cue as East Asian. Ages 10–14. (Mar.)