Keith Silva, The Comics Journal:
“The protagonist may be a 20-ish lesbian with a yen for communal living, but the details suggest that de Souza is working through some shit – the death of his mother, perhaps, when he was a young person, perhaps. This insight is far from insightful but demonstrates de Souza’s talent as a storyteller and cartoonist to channel personal trauma into art and provide a perspective that is beyond the SOP of indie autobio comics to bleed out at the expense of a fully-formed story.
What follows is an eddy of memories as time flattens out, and, like its loosey-goosey narrative, the recall of love’s first blush becomes the last time the protagonist visited her father, which turns into a bit of storybook doggerel, and on and on, guiding our protagonist through all this like a green light on the opposite shore, to perhaps her mother’s grace.
Once the sensory deprivation session ends, de Souza takes the story back to its freeform beginning, a combination of thought-provoking images with open-ended captions like “this is the hardest part; that all things exist concurrently” and “What I am trying to tell you is bigger than any of these words.” This latter line of narration seems overindulgent and chafes against the trust de Souza has established early on in the story: that the reader will figure out what’s happening as the protagonist (and de Souza) noodle through the process of healing. If the opening with the young girl and the symbolism of the rock didn’t make it clear enough that the reader is going to have to figure out on their own what they’ve been handed, the last third of ish does so with a vengeance.”
Read the full review on The Comic Journal’s website here!
