There’s precious little good news out there for creatives at the moment, so when life throws you a bone, you tend to clamp it firmly between your jaws and suck every drop of goodness out of it.
In that vein, I’m delighted to report that Dead Ends!—the children’s book I illustrated, and co-wrote with my wife—has been given a rare starred review by Kirkus:
The premise of the book is that through the history of medicine, some disasters were all downside, but what looked like a dead end was sometimes just a change of direction in disguise. We look at the diagnoses, experiments, and treatments that were frequently useless, and often harmful, but that sometimes led doctors to discoveries that changed the world for the better.
We take kids on a whirlwind tour of the human body—from brain, to heart, to limbs—and guide them through centuries of medical mistakes and failures that have given science a better understanding of our bodies, and ways to treat them. And I’m especially pleased that I was able to load up every chapter with a generous helping of caricatures.
The book is released in the USA in October, and it’s available in the UK from January, but if you’d care to pre-order a copy, you can do so via the usual outlets, including the excellent Mysterious Bookshop. We think it’s a lot of macabre fun for the whole family.
Thank you!