I'm not going to lie, I was a bit skeptical doing it, because at first glance you have these weird and silly bird illustrations that I wasn't expecting. But oh, was I surprised. It's a story about grief and loss, but also about love and acceptance. The hard parts were perfectly balanced with the fun parts. This novel makes you feel a lot. The illustrations are really different and I think that makes the story that much more unique.

A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings was such an incredible read. This graphic novel is about Will's mother's last few months. Will includes conversations, planning for the inevitable, and more throughout the book. There were moments when my heart broke and moments where I laughed out loud. The illustrations were perfect.

This was a tough one for me. I had to keep stopping to absorb the anticipatory pain. From the description of the book, I knew already that the mother dies, and everything in the memoir relates one way or another to her death. Through fragmented memories, "mumin" is painted as the best kind of mom - understanding, caring, fun, creative, and only very occasionally strict (like, about sunscreen).

Woven throughout the memoir are episodes from the author's gender story. I was particularly interested in this aspect of the book, and I like the message that comes through here. It seemed to me that the author pretty much figured out their comfort point with gender and their parents were pretty much very accepting of it, except that they quickly medicalized and dove into specifics of surgery that their child wasn't actually exploring. I read this as "even the best allies can make wrong assumptions, and the story should always be driven by the person themselves".

I must admit that I was hoping for more crosswords and fewer animals, just given the cover. I was delighted to find at least one crossword, made up of gender expansive terms. The creatures along with a multitude of nicknames and memories fragmented in time occasionally tripped me up so I didn't always understand the reason why a particular scene was included. Once you figure out that the birds are never family members, the panels in boxes are from the past, and mom's hair is another time clue, it gets a lot easier to follow the author's logic.

All in all I'm glad I read this book even though the non-human illustrations were a little out of my comfort zone. It was nice to have a Maia Kobabe quote on the cover (their memoir is one of my favorites!) reminding me that the book is "deeply human".

I enjoyed reading this graphic novel and found it surprisingly moving in many ways. I will definitely recommend it to others and look for more titles by this author in the future.