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A review by lawbooks600
To This Day by Shane L. Koyczan
emotional
fast-paced
4.0
Representation: Black and Asian characters
Score: Seven points out of ten.
I saw this book hiding on the shelves on one of the two libraries I go to so not long after I finished another book I immediately picked this up and finally read it. When I finished it, I thought I never saw a book like this before, because it's not a novel. It's a poem, with illustrations but I've read poetry books before. Just not like this one where it's only one poem that spans an entire book. Usually poetry novels have multiple poems, but not this one, thus I can't normally judge it the way I would generally judge a novel (like the pacing, characters, plot, world-building and so on.) They don't apply here, but I'll try my best to judge it. First off is that it's free verse with no characters, just images of people. Right off the bat the message that bullying is bad is clear but it never came off as too preachy. I liked the writing style and when the poem tried to deal with challenging topics like mental illness and verbal bullying. But I felt that they were given a mention and then forgotten about to focus on the dominant message about anti-bullying and if it weren't for the foreword and afterword they would've gotten even less of a mentioning. The poem has some phone numbers to various mental health services which I liked but I could never fully relate to it since it's rare for me to read a book with only one poem in it and nothing else. The illustrations helped. The book can work without it but with it it's more impactful. With that out of the way I appreciate the author for making this book and he also explained how he did a TED Talk in 2013 (that's 10 years ago now at the time of writing) and an animated video to much success.
Score: Seven points out of ten.
I saw this book hiding on the shelves on one of the two libraries I go to so not long after I finished another book I immediately picked this up and finally read it. When I finished it, I thought I never saw a book like this before, because it's not a novel. It's a poem, with illustrations but I've read poetry books before. Just not like this one where it's only one poem that spans an entire book. Usually poetry novels have multiple poems, but not this one, thus I can't normally judge it the way I would generally judge a novel (like the pacing, characters, plot, world-building and so on.) They don't apply here, but I'll try my best to judge it. First off is that it's free verse with no characters, just images of people. Right off the bat the message that bullying is bad is clear but it never came off as too preachy. I liked the writing style and when the poem tried to deal with challenging topics like mental illness and verbal bullying. But I felt that they were given a mention and then forgotten about to focus on the dominant message about anti-bullying and if it weren't for the foreword and afterword they would've gotten even less of a mentioning. The poem has some phone numbers to various mental health services which I liked but I could never fully relate to it since it's rare for me to read a book with only one poem in it and nothing else. The illustrations helped. The book can work without it but with it it's more impactful. With that out of the way I appreciate the author for making this book and he also explained how he did a TED Talk in 2013 (that's 10 years ago now at the time of writing) and an animated video to much success.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide attempt, Bullying, and Mental illness
Full trigger warnings: Bullying, mental illness, depression, suicide attempt