My Body in Pieces

February 15, 2021
In this graphic memoir, 20-year-old French Canadian Marie-No�lle lives alone with her cat, Ganache, and a sense of self-loathing that threatens to swallow her whole. Since her early childhood in Montr�al, she has believed herself to be fat and unlovable, and she binges on junk food to replace the loneliness that consumes her. Through vivid flashbacks, Marie-No�lle revisits memories of childhood bullies, absent family members, and an obsession with perfect princesses. Through dance, she once loved her body but over time replaced that love with harsh, negative judgment. She distances herself from everyone, but her life begins to shift when she goes to university and makes a best friend, Matilda, who makes her feel seen and accepted and suggests that Marie-No�lle find a therapist. Through therapy, Marie-No�lle finally realizes that it is acceptable for bodies to come in all shapes and sizes and that her weight is not connected to her worth as a person. This journey to self-acceptance allows her to reconnect with her friends and family as well as herself. The strongest element of the book is the gripping and gorgeous illustrations, which capture Marie-No�lle's emotions and magnify the spare dialogue and descriptions. The charcoal pencil-style art is hauntingly realistic, with soft-edged panels and hand-lettered text in black or white. Main characters appear White. A touching story about love, forgiveness, and self-acceptance. (Graphic memoir. 14-18)

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April 1, 2021

Gr 8 Up-Body image issues occupy a unique intersection, where one's intimate self and the perceptions of others-family, peers, and even strangers-collide. H�bert's chronicle of her struggles to reclaim her body is fractured, intense, and blurred around the edges, like the youthful memories it captures. Stunning photo-realistic snapshots depict H�bert as a chubby-cheeked child teased relentlessly by her family for her appetite, then as an uneasy teen, obsessed with her weight, who goes from bingeing to overexercising. As a young adult, with distance from her home life and with the help of kind friends and therapy, she finally learns to see beauty in her own image. H�bert's lush pencil work brings wellsprings of emotion to every image, making tense exchanges feel crushing and moments of self-love exhilarating. This slightly disjointed narrative is no tidy handbook on conquering body image issues, but it is intensely relatable-like taking a long, hard look in the mirror. H�bert and most of her friends and family appear to be white. VERDICT This dreamy, visually acute remembrance of reclaiming one's body in its complex beauty is powerfully personal and appropriate for thoughtful middle and high schoolers, ideally with room for adult guidance and conversation on developing positive and resilient self-image.-Emilia Packard, Austin

Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 5, 2021
“Each day I focus on finding fault with my body, one piece at a time,” Hébert writes in this moody personal examination of body image. Fuzzy-bordered grayscale graphite panels range from blurry impressions of judgmental relatives to the brutal clarity of makeup-mirror close-ups. After leaving her verbally abusive father, unsupportive mother, and an aunt who offers unsolicited dieting advice, Marie-Noëlle, 20, lives alone but for her cat. The comfort she finds in food has transformed into self-loathing, revisited through childhood memory fragments. In illustrations based on family snapshots and yearbook photos, Hébert recalls a preschool “obsession” with princesses, dolefully tries on ill-fitting department-store clothes at age eight, faces bullies at 11, and considers buying a razor to harm herself (“Then I just feel like a big cliché and I go back home”). Self-destructive ideation convinces her to seek counseling, and her college friend Matilda encourages her. Hébert’s emotive panels of fragmented, abstract bodies could be stand-alone placards for anger and grief. A feel-good, if slightly underbuilt, denouement recommends self-acceptance (“What if I’d loved myself from the beginning?”), albeit tempered by the more honest rage that drives this raw, cathartic debut graphic memoir. Ages 14–up.

April 15, 2021
Grades 9-12 Marie-No�lle is fat in a world where fat is a bad word. Through the visual metaphor of the narrator literally swallowing the princess myth as she becomes obsessed with Barbie, pop stars, and her inability to compete, Marie-No�lle takes comfort in food, even as her family criticizes her full eyebrows, the way she dresses, and--always--her weight. After trying everything she's told to do--drinking water, working out, not eating--she leaves home at 17 and recenters her world around her friends, but her anxiety and depression pull her away once more. An examination of self-worth, self-loathing, and the pain one feels when the only thing that seems to matter is what's on the outside, this graphic memoir presents an honest look at how quickly advice given with love can start to feel like hate. Drawn in pencil and presented in black and white, the precise art and careful shading lay out each panel as if it were a picture in a photo album, increasing the personal while underscoring the universality of children striving for socially constructed perfection.

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