Featherproof Books

Tiny is a contemporary, poetic retelling of Sophocles' Antigone, set in the mossy greens and foggy grays of the Pacific Northwest. Instead of two brothers who kill each other in a civil war, Tiny has a brother who kills himself after coming home from a far-away war. Tiny is a teenage girl, and so is understandably messed up by death, she also understands it in a way that her dad and the government just can't. Tiny misses her brother, forever, but—with the help of her best friend Izzy, boyfriend Hank, and a collective dance night held in an old artificial limb store—she escapes freezing herself in grief, too. Using different perspectives and desires, facts from plants and history, and brass knuckles and Frankie Knuckles, Tiny wonders how we mourn and move, in time.

For children, the world is possibility. But grown-ups would do well to remember that possibility extends to places full of light and steeped in darkness, with plenty of other spaces in between. Children are human after all, and as such, they are sometimes innocent, sometimes cruel, and frequently impossible for others to truly understand.
In her debut graphic novel, The Nightingale That Never Sang, Juliana Hyrri gives us stories that are stolen from real life, seen through a child’s eyes—and do not look away when it comes to the scary parts. If it can happen out there, it can happen within these pages, too.
Her visual style comprises the smudged, scribbled, and smooth lines one might expect from a (very) young artist, but also pulsing, boundless backgrounds painted with near-manic energy. If there is any true purity to be found here, it’s only in the reflection of how a child feels, before those feelings are tempered with adult ideas of what ought to be revealed in polite conversation.
Nightingale takes us along for the ride as children discover and dream their world, through glimpses of tadpoles and tent forts, field trips and forest ventures, stray cats and sleepovers. On the surface, these are scenes anyone might recognize from their own childhood, but it’s really a book filled with the blank spaces that grown-ups won’t talk about, scribbled over with childhood logic.