Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Fra

Frances Cannon's beautiful and searing memoir electrifies the reader with its deft, playful extended metaphors, its lyrical movement back and forth through time, and above all, its story arc built around deft crescendos; it reads like a page-turning novel, but Cannon's determined and often heartbreaking quest for personal truth also provokes the reader to re-imagine his or her own emotional terrain. I dare anyone to read it in more than one sitting.

--Jenny Land, author of The Spare Room, teaches English and creative writing at St. Johnsbury Academy in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Frances Cannon's graphic memoir spills out from the page into an ink menagerie of creatures, who shepherd the reader through the crisis and catharsis of her highly original, new-millennium Bildungsroman. Everything in Cannon's world refuses to be crowned this or that, and instead revels in the estuary where adolescence and adulthood, dreams and reality flow into one another.

--BENJAMIN ALESHIRE works as a poet, an artist, an assistant poetry editor for the Green Mountains Review, and the editor of Honeybee Press. He is the author of Currency, a collection of poems.