Advance Review: Tracy White’s ‘Unaccompanied’ Shares Raw Victim Stories To Raise Awareness
by Anton Kromoff
Summary
When you think about the work and realize these horrible things have happened to actual people, it’s hard to shake the mark Unaccompanied leaves on you. The fact this is happening in the world and these are but five stories of thousands upon thousands, while people with power spend their money shooting beer cans and stopping kids from being able to use a bathroom they feel comfortable in just makes the world feel so bleak and cold.
Overall
10/10Welcome to the table,
The content in this book is difficult. It could very easily trigger a lot of people and I really just want to be sure before you move further through this that you understand this is hard material to face and could run the risk of upsetting or dredging up things.
First, I will give you a very vague-ish critique of the work. What comes after the cover image below may be upsetting. so again, I am trying to warn you. Please, if you are not comfortable with really heavy topics go ahead and take from this what you can and move on.
I wish you the best.
Tracy White‘s Unaccompanied: Stories of Brave Teenagers Seeking Asylum (on sale June 20th, 2023) is difficult to read. Sometimes it’s because the stories captured in the work are full of abuse and heartache, sometimes it’s because the word bubbles have not been aligned to the text itself and things are all off-kilter and weird. Sometimes the dialog and art do strange things that feel like you are playing a seek-and-find game trying to figure out where the speaker is and what exactly is going on in the panel. None of that should deter you from reading it, IF you are emotionally able to do so.
The book tells five true stories focused on the lives of teenagers who had to go out alone and flee their home countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guinea. These brave survivors traveled through dangerous and often unkind places eventually coming to America where they sought asylum.
The stories are based on extensive interviews with teen refugees, lawyers, caseworkers, and activists and shine a light on why some young people would literally risk their lives to seek safety in the US.
The stories presented in this book are nothing short of heartbreaking and horrific. The art is rough and sparse, the lettering is unskilled and there are points where it does not even line up with the speech bubbles, but the rawness of the art alongside stories of rape, genital mutilation, and systematic abuse seems to be the right choice for this work. The stories of these individuals need to shine through and the basic art allows for that in a way that anything over-rendered or overworked could not do.
The book finishes with a lot of good information, references, notes, and research material for further reading if you choose to do so. I don’t know what we need to do to fix the world, but anything at this point feels like it’s better than nothing.
Until next time, be kind to each other. You never know what someone else is going through.
