SMALL WORLD

or illustrated more than three dozen children’s picture books, but his 2009 graphic memoir, , a National Book Award finalist, isn’t so appropriate for the young’uns. In cinematic style, Small depicts the psychological traumas of his childhood: a closeted lesbian mother whose pent-up bitterness filled the home with dread, and an emotionally distant radiologist father whose X-ray treatments of his son’s sinus problems gave the boy thyroid cancer. Small’s surgery—the large growth in his neck was just a cyst, his parents lied—left him virtually unable to speak for decades, so he spoke with his pen instead. , Small’s new graphic novel, chronicles another difficult childhood, this one fictional. Russell arrives in a small California town in the 1950s with his checked-out, alcoholic father and does his best to blend