The Books

Monster Mama

by Liz Rozenberg
Illustrated by Stephen Gammell

One Potato Review

“No matter where you go, or what you do,” says Patrick Edward’s mother, “I will be there. Because I am your mother, even if I am a monster – and I love you.” That is about the measure of this story: syntactically a little odd, artistically extremely odd. The pictures look like painted strings dragged across the page, with here and there a brush-tip splatter and explosion, but this strikingly macabre vision of a normal school-going boy and his freakish, cave-dwelling Mama finally amounts to nothing more menacing than our best (if primal) notions of motherhood, and it shines brighter for all of the shadows.