Good: From the Amazon Jungle to Suburbia and Back

This uneven coming-of-age graphic autofiction from Good (The Way Around) and artist FLuX entices with its “inspired by true events” premise but varies in its execution of the story’s emotional beats. David is a half-Yanomami, half-American boy whose Indigenous mother met his anthropologist father in the Amazon. For the first five years of David’s life, the family moves back and forth between countries. David struggles with his “double life” in the New Jersey suburbs, where he’s bullied for his biracial appearance (“You look like one of those Indians from that movie... The Last Mohican,” jokes a “token jerk”). His mother, Yarima, ultimately abandons the family, in order to return to live with her tribe in the rainforest. David’s father, Kenneth, rarely acknowledges Yarima’s absence, while David descends into a years-long identity crisis that spirals into self-harm and alcohol abuse before he turns his life around following a drunk-driving accident. Chapters alternate between David’s story and a mostly dialogue-free retelling of Yarima’s life in a paradisal landscape drawn in eye-popping colors by FLuX. In David’s sections, black-and-white art—where characters outlined in white appear as flat cutouts—magnifies the bleakness of his adolescence but can drag in its replay of trauma. A fleeting family reunion in the book’s final pages seems anticlimactic. Though this has its moments, it never quite soars. (May)