When the best artist in the seventh grade's creativity gets blocked, he must embrace imperfection to find his way back to his craft and his voice. Grant Snider (Blue Floats Away) delivers sincere scribbles, gravity-defying gummy worms, and a dose of persistence in the imaginative, introspective middle-grade novel-in-verse The Year I Stopped Drawing.
Adam's parents are fighting over his dad's drinking, prompting his dad to move out. The new girl at school has drawing talent to surpass Adam's own, causing him to wonder why he should bother pursuing art anymore when, even if he tries his hardest, he'll "never be the best." Meanwhile, a bully has it out for Adam, making snide comments every time he makes even a small mistake. Adam's feelings are so enormous that he finds it hard to talk at all, let alone creatively express himself: "I can't tell anyone/ what's happening to my family./ So what's the point/ of talking?/ I can't show anyone/ what's happening inside of me./ So what's the point/ of drawing?" His art, his "portal," has vanished. In short, "puberty is like drawing/ a horse riding a bicycle"--an absurd, self-conscious balancing act that nonetheless demands that Adam "hang on." As he tries various methods to escape his stress and sadness (including band, track, and writing on sticky notes), he finds freedom in showing up worried and unsure, persisting in a beautifully awkward way.
Snider reveals Adam's interior world through his evolving art style: a self-portrait in light pencil when he feels barely there; heavy, unsteady abstract squiggles when he's frustrated. When Adam contemplates a cubist still-life painting, he imagines how his own still life would depict the elements in motion and chaos, "the vase--shattered" and "the apple--sauced." Adam's struggles to speak are also reflected in the formatting of the illustrated page itself--it's shown scribbled out, torn up, and crumpled--and the text, which at times becomes translucent and disappears from the page altogether.
The unlikely miracle of a gummy worm that remains stuck on the ceiling all year encapsulates Snider's approach in the novel, which seeks and appreciates little bits of weird in the everyday. The Year I Stopped Drawing is a demonstrative, heartening narrative about the highs and lows of creative expression. It is a quirky, poignant, and always thoughtful story about the interplay between talent, self-conceptualization, and perfectionism. The Year I Stopped Drawing will surely capture readers who experience art as both question and answer. --Ari Mackoff, bookseller
Shelf Talker: A seventh-grade artist fights through his blocked creativity by trial and error in this imaginative, introspective middle-grade novel-in-verse full of scribbles and sticky notes.