It’s never a good sign when it takes you months and months to read a book. It’s an even worse sign when that book is a graphic novel. But it took me roughly three months to claw my way through Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole.

This book was lauded by most everyone who wrote about it. I learned this only because I had to do some googling to figure out the hell I just read.

The veneration was my first surprise. My second was that the main characters, teenagers Perry and Ruth, are step siblings. That second surprise made me like the book even less than I thought I did.

What we have here is a sort of coming of age of two southern teens, both afflicted with schizophrenia to some degree. I’m not sure if there are varying degrees of schizophrenia, but I’m willing to give Powell a buy on that. I’m not willing to give him a buy on the utter coincidence of the step siblings both having schizophrenia, unless their parents met at some sort of support group. If that’s the case we should know that.

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