The next meeting of the Cobb Public Library‘s virtual Graphic Novel Book Club will be tomorrow evening, Monday September 25 at 6 p.m. Before you make the assumption that you are “too old” to participate in a book club centered around graphic novels, bear in mind that I’m 71 years old, and a regular participant.

The library’s announcement for the event described this month’s reading as follows:

PLEASE NOTE: This program will occur online and will not take place in the library. See the link below to join the program at the specified time.

From graphic medicine to superheroes, the Graphic Novel Book Club seeks to explore it all. We will meet from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on the fourth Monday of each month.

Physical copies can be placed on hold for pickup at the library of your choice. Registration is not required, but if you sign-up here (https://forms.gle/7G5zMx9rtwkj2fQd6), you will receive reminders before each meeting. Anyone may come to the virtual meeting by clicking the link below.

Click here to join the meeting (https://meet.google.com/ctm-nkzi-oko?hs=122&authuser=0)

September 26: Stitches by David Small

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David, a highly anxious yet supremely talented child, all too often became the unwitting object of his parents’ buried frustration and rage. Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer. Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden. Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen, with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist, will resonate as the ultimate survival statement. A silent movie masquerading as a book, Stitches renders a broken world suddenly seamless and beautiful again.

For more information email Amanda Sanders at Amanda.Sanders@cobbcounty.org

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Please note: this is a virtual event and not being held at a physical location.

Register for the club at this link.

About the Cobb County Public Library

According to the Cobb County Public Library website:

Cobb County Public Library is a 15-branch system headquartered in Marietta, Georgia, where its staff members serve a diverse population of over 750,000 people. Cobb is one of Georgia’s fastest-growing counties, and Cobb County Public Library is dedicated to being a resource center in the community by providing equal access to information, materials, and services.

History of Cobb’s library system

The first public library in Cobb County was opened in the home of Sarah Freeman Clarke in Marietta. The first standalone library building, opened on Church Street in 1893 and was named for Clarke.

Libraries were opened in Acworth and Austell in subsequent years, and in 1959, the city of Marietta and several other Cobb County libraries combined to form a countywide system that began the Cobb County Public Library as we know it today.

You can read more about the history of the Cobb County Public Library by following this link.