By Alyssa Bermudez
A real diary-comic memoir: a girl starts ninth grade in 2002 New York while her father's liver illness gets worse.
It's September 2002, and Alyssa is starting ninth grade at an all-girls school in New York City. She's juggling a heavy course load, new friends, a crush left over from summer camp, and the cross-country team, where running becomes the one place she can breathe. Underneath all of it, her father's liver illness keeps getting worse. The book is built from the dated diary entries the author kept as a teenager, so it follows one hard year the way it actually happened, day by day.
This is the follow-up to Big Apple Diaries, and because it's a real diary, the feelings arrive in the order they actually did: surprise, anger, guilt, grief, and sometimes an ordinary funny day sitting right next to a terrible one. The comic format carries the weight. Pages turn fast, the drawings do a lot of the emotional work, and a child who reads Raina Telgemeier can manage the reading here even when the subject is heavy. If your child has lost someone, or is living with an illness in the family, this shows a girl finding real ways through it: running, drawing, writing, and letting her friends close.