Squirrel Mother - Softcover

Megan Kelso lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and daughter. Her books include Queen of the Black Black, The Squirrel Mother, and Artichoke Tales.

*Starred Review* Kelso draws figures and faces as abstract as those in Bil Keane's hardy single-panel strip Family Circus, but she deploys her reductions in stories more like high-brow prose short stories than those of any other alternative comics creator. "The Squirrel Mother," for example, shows a single mother making a dress for her daughter in the first several stacks of two big panels on each of its six pages, while two side-by-side small panels perched atop the big ones show a squirrel anthropomorphically caring for three kits. The mother has been deserted by her husband and, before the piece ends, sits to brood in a chair on the porch; meanwhile, the squirrel packs a suitcase and walks away into the night. The focal character in the big panels is the little girl, who, one can assume, envisions both story lines from the vantage of several years later. The assumption irrepressibly educes profound, aching sympathy for the all-too-human situation depicted. Most of the other stories are similarly affecting, though the longest is something completely different: an intelligent, dramatic reassessment of the early American politician Alexander Hamilton and the long, still-ongoing struggle between federalism and republicanism in American governance. Ray Olson
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