Congrats to the Harper Collins Union workers for getting Harper Collins to come to the table with a tentative agreement! Happy to finally get this review back up! https://twitter.com/hcpunion/status/1623850750815117312 

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I always enjoy graphic novel memoirs where the author is also the artist, because their personality often comes through in the art, making for a personal and interesting story. Gao's art is pretty sketchy here, a bit simple at times, but the color work is lovely, and at times she does some really great pieces to show some more emotionally complex themes.

As for the writing, I enjoyed Gao's storytelling. She's very open about the racism she experienced growing up, but doesn't shy away from showing that she had internalized some of that herself. The pacing felt a bit too fast, but with Gao covering basically her entire life in one graphic novel, it's understandable.

I thought the inclusion of COVID-19 would be a turn off for me because I am definitely personally not in a place where I can face that in what I read, but it was actually pretty minimal here. Enough to show how Gao was affected by it, but not much more than that.

Overall, this was another to add to the list of great graphic memoirs.