Imagine Wanting Only This

December 19, 2016
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.

Starred review from February 1, 2017
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 written--a subtle dazzler of a debut.

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November 1, 2017

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 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
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?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)