Hot Comb

Starred review from November 1, 2019

DEBUT In the titular piece that opens this carefully crafted and deeply felt short story collection, an 11-year-old girl eager to convince her mother to allow her to get a perm in order to stop her friends from thinking she's "too white" learns a painful lesson about the difficulty of living up to the expectations of others. In another tale, the sole black member of a softball team suffers trauma that follows her into adulthood after her teammates become obsessed with how her hair differs from their own. Author/artist Flowers employs a dazzling array of illustration and storytelling techniques across the eight stories here, which all somehow revolve around black women's hair but manage to encompass an enormous range of experiences--coming of age, coping with grief, classism, family drama, friendship, dealing with stereotypes and racism at home and abroad--with heart, humor, and an unflinching determination to deliver truth free from sentimentality. VERDICT Readers are sure to find these stories moving and illuminating, and may be shocked to discover, given the talent on display, that this is Flower's first book.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2019
Kinks, coils, and manes feature prominently in this autobiographical mash-up of hair-based stories. Flowers reveals a variety of narratives surrounding hair traditions from within the Black diaspora, from Baltimore to Angola. In these vignettes, chemical hair relaxers represent coming of age, avoiding swimming helps preserve a meticulously prepared hairstyle, and a variety of beauty ads promise consumers both natural and synthetic irresistibility. Flowers taps into the pride Black women take in caring for hair and the broad cultural milieu and conversations surrounding it. While the black-and-white artwork can be amateurish and the overall flow is uneven, the themes are certainly underrepresented within the comics tradition and should draw a greater audience for Black women's voices. Pop-culture references from the 1990s, such as TLC's Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg and Arrested Development's Everyday People, will evoke warm nostalgia in the most senior millennials, though they might not resonate with younger adults. The work's embedded discourses of class, race, and internalized European beauty standards concerning good hair, however, transcend generations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)