A hilarious and heartwrenching story about surviving middle school–and an unthinkable diagnosis–while embracing life’s weirdness.
WINK
by Rob Harrell
Dial Books for Young Readers, 2020
(via Writers House)
Ross Maloy just wants to be a normal seventh grader. He doesn’t want to lose his hair, or wear a weird hat, or deal with the disappearing friends who don’t know what to say to « the cancer kid. » But with his recent diagnosis of a rare eye cancer, blending in is off the table.
Based on Rob Harrell’s real life experience, and packed with comic panels and spot art, this incredibly personal and poignant novel is an unforgettable, heartbreaking, hilarious, and uplifting story of survival and finding the music, magic, and laughter in life’s weirdness.
Rob Harrell created the Life of Zarf series, the graphic novel Monster on the Hill, and also writes and draws the long-running daily comic strip Adam@Home, which appears in more than 140 papers worldwide. He created and drew the internationally syndicated comic strip Big Top until 2007. He lives with his wife in Indiana.
Ordinary pig, Gary Yorkshire, has his entire life turned upside down when a bite on the nose from a radioactive bat turns him into . . . BATPIG. With the support of his best friends, Brooklyn the bat and Carl the fish, he finally feels like he’s getting a handle on this whole superhero business. That is, until he faces a battle against time itself, when an underappreciated janitor slows down the clock so much that a math class never ever ends (the horror!). Can Batpig save the class from never-ending fractions?
In this hilarious, hijinks-filled graphic novel super-swine Batpig is ready to face even bigger bullies, harder fights, and scariest of all—meeting his superhero idol.