a

I like the art style in general and some of the content was interesting, but the structure of the book was all over the place. The author jumps around topics like their personal life growing up, River Phoenix, and the white nationalist history of Oregon without really tying those things all together successfully. Also, they use a very stylized cursive font that was hard to read at times. The quality of the writing was stilted and lackluster. The author could stand to practice drawing hands a bit more. ( )

This is one of those books that is put with the graphic novels, but seems more like an illustrated essay to me, with each page having a single illustration with a block of text above or below. Oddly, Murphy has chosen to present their work on pages of elementary school writing paper, the vertical type with under half of the page left blank for a drawing and the larger section with solid and dashed red and blue lines intended to help practice printing or cursive. The text is handwritten cursive that usually does not adhere to the writing paper rules but does use the markings for alignment. After chapter divisions we are given a backside view of those pages, showing how the paint or markers or whatever have soaked through.

Anyhow, the book kicks off with the author's memory of the death of River Phoenix and sort of sketches a little bio of him, focusing on his roles in My Own Private Idaho and Stand by Me and his involvement through Gus Van Sant with Portland's gay and drug cultures. Much shade is cast on Van Sant before a segue into a history of white supremacy in Portland and Oregon through a young skinhead Van Sant knew named Kenneth "Ken Death" Mieske who was convicted for the murder of Mulugeta Seraw. Increasingly random events like the Whitman massacre, the Bundy standoff, the Mount Hood disaster of 1986 with the Oregon Episcopal School hiking group, and the crash of United Airlines 173 get pulled into the book, between chapters railing against police brutality and how Geraldo Rivera got his nose broken on his talk show by skinheads. There is a really vague attempt to make tenuous connections between some of this through the high school the author attended and the predominately Black Portland neighborhood where their White family lived.

I agree with the author's viewpoints for the most part, but the journey careens about too much between Tiger Beat worship of Phoenix and polemics against injustice that express outrage but offer no action plans or agenda items beyond, well, that sucks. ( )