Like his favorite character, Alice, David Small leads the reader through a kaleidoscopic wonderland in his memoir Stitches. But this is no technicolor animation - young David's journey is a painful hell punctuated by emotional and physical estrangement that has obviously had a formative effect on his art. The adults in his life loom over him like leering eyeless zombies as he discovers that nobody's supposed to call his grandmother "crazy," and that the supposedly harmless surgery he needs has turned into a nightmarish tumor removal that leaves him nearly mute. Finally, David is rescued from the brink of insanity (and expulsions from boarding schools) by his own White Rabbit, a psychiatrist who helps him come to terms with his family's dysfunction and his own confusions.

Expressively told in wavering lines washed with gray pools of shadow, David Small morphs his memories from reality to fantasy and back. Theatre seats become teeth in a mouth; a cavernous void which he cannot use to express himself (literally or figuratively). A recurring dream in which, Alice-like, he is forced through smaller and smaller doors only to emerge in a scene of chaos and destruction gives his narrative more figurative depth. Ultimately, this is a story of hope - his epilogue goes on to give a bit more backstory to his parents' lives and his determination to escape the cycle of denial that had been percolating for several generations. Give this one to anyone who needs proof that art (however you define it) has the ability to set you free.