Ash's Cabin

I miiiiiiight have been a little un-busy at a bookfair this morning so I figured I'd get a small book off of my TBR pile. Here's Jen Wang's "Ash's Cabin."

["Ash has always felt alone.

Adults ignore the climate crisis. Other kids Ash’s age are more interested in pop stars and popularity contests than in fighting for change. Even Ash’s family seems to be sleepwalking through life.

The only person who ever seemed to get Ash was their Grandpa Edwin. Before he died, he used to talk about building a secret cabin, deep in the California wilderness. Did he ever build it? What if it’s still there, waiting for him to come back…or for Ash to find it? To Ash, that maybe-mythical cabin is starting to feel like the perfect place for a fresh start and an escape from the miserable feeling of alienation that haunts their daily life.

But making the wilds your home isn’t easy. And as much as Ash wants to be alone…can they really be happy alone? Can they survive alone?"]

This graphic novel was hauntingly beautiful. It was filled with so many images drawn with so much skill, but it was also filled with so many hard-as-fuck feelings (loneliness, deadnaming, death, climate change, ect). And yet, Jen Wang combined all of it together to create such a triumphet coming of age story.

I loooooove how this story handled Ash getting deadnamed. In a perfect world, when a person changes their name, there would be no confusion, no forgetting, no constantly correcting people; unfortunately, we live in a world where a lot of humans suck. However, when Ash was deadname, it was printed a large black strikethrough, so thick that we can't see the deadname. It was soooo simple and yet so beautiful. 

You also learn a lot about the wildnerness and surviving in the wild alongside Ash. It's almost like "Hatchet", but Ash willingly threw themselves into living a life in the wild. But don't get me wrong, Ash didn't have it easy. They failed quite a few times, but they grew stronger and more confident as the novel progressed. 

And, whereas we'd love to have Ash change the entire world for the better, they did managed to raise awareness to their family, to their school, and to a few other strangers via the news (spoiler alert?). 

Trigger Warnings: deadnaming, climate change, wild fires, doggos getting injured, and more.

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