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Summary
Summary
A gorgeous graphic memoir about loss, love, and confronting grief. * "What ultimately emerges is a portrait of a powerful mind grappling with alienation and loneliness." -- The New York Times Book Review
When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and the sight of an abandoned mining town after his funeral marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. Along the way, we learn about her family and a rare genetic heart disease that has been passed down through generations, and revisit tragic events in America's past.
A narrative that is at once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke's stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: Why are we here, and what will we leave behind?
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout; part of the Pantheon Graphic Novel series)
Author Notes
KRISTEN RADTKE is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and the film and video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She lives in New York.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
This insightful, lyrical graphic novel is part memoir, part meditation on mortality and geography. After her beloved uncle died young as the result of a rare genetic condition, Radtke, who may have the same condition, began contemplating her own mortality and permanence in general. She became obsessed with the ruins of civilization: How is Greece's crumbling Parthenon different than the buildings of Gary, IN, or the remains of the U.S. naval base on Corregidor in the Philippines? The book focuses on Radtke's life in college and grad school, and teens will identify with her desire to find her place, emotionally and geographically. With a melancholy air, the nonlinear narrative cycles between past and present, between general history and the more intimate history of Radtke's own life. The black-and-white illustrations occasionally incorporate photographs and adroitly capture small details and the passage of time as she rails against, and ultimately accepts, the transitory nature of life and tries to figure out what it all means. VERDICT This moving and thought-provoking account will resonate with most teens. A vital addition to graphic novel collections.-Jennifer Rothschild, -Arlington Public Library, Arlington, VA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Writer, illustrator, and editor Radtke's graphic memoir does something difficult within just a few minimally designed, emotional pages: she transforms the over-studied experience of being a talented artist stuck in that yearning gulf between college's purpose and life's demands into something unique and thuddingly real. Starting with a bracing trip she takes as a Chicago art student into a ruined Gary, Ind., cathedral, and framing her story with the sometimes panicky fatalism that comes with a dangerous heart defect, Radtke unspools a ruminative narrative about searching for meaning in an impermanent world. The focus on entropy, decay, and randomness would be grim and borderline pretentious if it weren't delivered with an unusually forthright honesty and deft, Chris Marker-esque ability to parse out meaning and wonder from the smallest details. Though the story of her investigative journey into decay around the world resonates, it is flattened by artwork that, oddly enough, has almost no sense of place. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Insights and images combine in a meditation on loss, grief, and the illusions of permanence.Sarabande Books managing editor Radtke isn't an artist who also writes a little or a writer who scrawls but a master of both prose narrative and visual art. Like memory, the narrative loosens the binds of chronology, playing hopscotch through the author's girlhood, college, formative years as an artist, and apocalyptic fantasy of her current home in New York. A strain of heart failure seems to run in Radtke's family, and the key to this memoir is the death of her favorite uncle, who was recovering from the surgery that ultimately killed him and whose death made the author and her family all the more concerned with the family medical history. The event also planted the seed for this book and its larger thematic focus, as Radtke became "consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn't." On her return home for the funeral, the author discovered an abandoned mining town that she would later revisit. During art school, she became fascinated by Gary, Indiana, a city in ruins, where she discovered the photos of someone whose attempts to document the city led to his death. She left a fiance and what she imagined to be a "stagnant future" for vagabond travels taking her from the ruins of Italy to the ravages of Southeast Asia, while her own heart condition gave notions of impermanence and loss a personal emphasis. "I couldn't comprehend why the dead couldn't be made undead," she writes. "Why a heart that caved couldn't be filled out again." In a way, what she has done in this impressive book is to revive the dead and recover the lost while illuminating a world in flux, in which change is the only constant. Powerfully illustrated and incisively writtena subtle dazzler of a debut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When Radtke was in college, studying art in Chicago, the uncle she'd grown up adoring died of a heart condition. Around the same time, she visited Gary, Indiana, and began to cultivate a deep interest in the ruins of cities and decaying places. The idea of how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn't obsessed her. Radtke's neat, grayscale drawings are detailed and coloring-book precise, and her thoughtful, meticulous narration makes true visual essays of them. In grad school, she travels to the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, and Vietnam, seeking and studying international ruin-porn, as she notes some call it. Her story cartwheels, too, exploring the science behind her uncle's defect and the probability that she has it, too. She tells the story of the infamous fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, her home state, which decimated the area and took thousands of victims but remains regional lore after occurring on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire. In her cerebral journey of a first book, Radtke, an illustrator, designer, and managing editor of a small press, asks and answers: Why do ruins fascinate, and why is this fascination considered perverse? Why are ruins there at all?--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
At first glance, ruins are romantic. Look again, and they often speak of pain and failure. In Imagine Only Wanting This, debuter Radtke explores all manner of devastation-the detritus of a youthful relationship, the aftermath of volcanic eruption, the hollowed-out shell of a church in deeply depressed Gary, IN. She remembers her favorite uncle, lost to a rare heart defect, and fears for her own heart, literally and figuratively. She recounts the story of a long-dead ancestor who implored, seemingly successfully, God's protection on her church during a massive firestorm in small-town Wisconsin by marching around the building's exterior, crucifix in hand. Beautifully written, this multidirectional memoir ties threads and minutiae from Radtke's personal and family history and history writ large to create a tender, drifting reflection on the calamity life is often built on, the nothing it will become, and the breathtaking beauty of lingering between those forgone conclusions. Her illustration abilities are somewhat stilted-she's a writer first and an illustrator second-but the art complements her flowing prose. Verdict A fantastic example of the graphic novel's possibilities as a literary medium, this work is visually imperfect, lyrically beautiful, and unquestionably brave. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]-Emilia Packard, Austin, TX © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.