I've read several of Barry's books now, and I hate to say it, but I find her drawings so very ugly. They do nothing for me in an aesthetic sense (such sense that I have, anyway) and yet I find them so compelling regardless, a sort of train wreck grotesquerie. Which is such a good visual choice for this particular graphic novel, about an adolescent boy in a difficult home, who is framed for arson, bullied in school, and finally descends into mental illness. It sounds really grim, and it is grim, and yet there's something so slyly entertaining about it that it's difficult to look away.