Lucy Is Sick

Lucy Is Sick is a book that invents a genre of its own: a children’s book for adults. Its playful magic and visual and verbal surprises overflow, yet this is a seductive trap. It ensnares the reader to tell the story of multiple myeloma, “an elusive cancer, not a bodily mass, not something hidden deep inside or palpable, but something fluid and formless, never one.”

A children’s book for adults allows for exceptional lucidity in engaging with volatile complexity: the body’s unraveling and the transformation of language under illness, memory and forgetting, medicine and pain — while at the same time lingering over grotesque and intimate moments, poems and fantasies, philosophy and cinema, a toilet flush button and an entire bestiary of animals.

The coloring pages do not merely accompany the text; they generate it. Out of this emerges a literary-visual creation that is delightful and terrifying, funny and painful, and at once inspiring and full of hope.