Shane Koyczan

Representation: Black and Asian characters
Trigger warnings: Bullying, mental illness, depression, suicide attempt
Score: Seven points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

I saw this book hiding on the shelves on one of the two libraries I go to so not long after I finished another book I immediately picked this up and finally read it. When I finished it, I thought I never saw a book like this before, because it's not a novel. It's a poem, with illustrations but I've read poetry books before. Just not like this one where it's only one poem that spans an entire book. Usually poetry novels have multiple poems, but not this one, thus I can't normally judge it the way I would generally judge a novel (like the pacing, characters, plot, world-building and so on.) They don't apply here, but I'll try my best to judge it. First off is that it's free verse with no characters, just images of people. Right off the bat the message that bullying is bad is clear but it never came off as too preachy. I liked the writing style and when the poem tried to deal with challenging topics like mental illness and verbal bullying. But I felt that they were given a mention and then forgotten about to focus on the dominant message about anti-bullying and if it weren't for the foreword and afterword they would've gotten even less of a mentioning. The poem has some phone numbers to various mental health services which I liked but I could never fully relate to it since it's rare for me to read a book with only one poem in it and nothing else. The illustrations helped. The book can work without it but with it it's more impactful. With that out of the way I appreciate the author for making this book and he also explained how he did a TED Talk in 2013 (that's 10 years ago now at the time of writing) and an animated video to much success.… (mais)

This is an incredibly powerful poem about bullying and it aftermath. The poem gives examples of how people bully each other and the way the bullying can haunt a person. One example is a women, who even as an adult doesn't believe she is beautiful because of the way she was treated in school. The poem also mentions that suicide is what some bullied students turn to. The message is very moving without being 'cheesy.' The illustrations were provided by multiple illustrators that also provided their own brief stories of being bullied.… (mais)