
Visitations | Review
Visitations
Writer/artist: Cory Egbert
Farrar Straus and Giroux; $17.99
Publisher’s age rating: 12-18 years
Children’s book illustrator Corey Egbert makes his graphic novel debut with Visitations, a powerful retelling of events from his own childhood, which began with a contentious divorce between his largely absent father and strict religious mother and ultimately culminated with his mother kidnapping him and his little sister (technically, legally kidnapping them; they went along with her willingly, and, at first, weren’t even sure that anything was actually very wrong with what was happening to them).
Egbert’s story begins with a rather gauzy early memory of playing on a swing with his mother, having a brief talk about Jesus, God, and magic, and then how he remembered falling off the swing. In his memory, he was swinging so high his toes were bruising the leaves of a nearby tree, although, logically, he knows now that was impossible and he must have imagined it.
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“It makes me wonder…” he writes in narration, “…How much of my childhood was real.”
From there, he tells us a little about his early family dynamic, and how it fell apart. His father worked far away, and he spent all day every day with his mother. His parents didn’t get along, and he was well aware of their fights. Things fell apart after his sister was two years old.
One night at bedtime, she said she didn’t want her dad to put her to bed, because he tickled her. Corey’s mom, whose own father had been arrested for molesting a little girl a few years previously, asked her husband what Sarah meant by that, and narrowed her eyes at him.
Soon they were divorced. Apparently, Corey’s mom had accused his dad of abusing his sister. The courts didn’t find any merit to her accusations and mandated weekly visitations between the kids and their father.
This set up a new, uncomfortable reality for the kids. Corey’s mom charged him with protecting his little sister from their father, never letting them be alone together, and, even harder, she asked the kids not to speak to their father at all during their visitations.
We see how difficult this must have been in one scene, and it’s excruciating watching their father having a one-sided conversation for pages, and even more so when he tries to tell Corey something very serious: His mother, Corey’s grandmother, had just died. She had been writing Corey letters every month since the separation, but Corey’s mom, who forbade them from seeing their father’s family, threw them all away. Corey’s dad kept copies for him.
One can only imagine how hard these visitations must have been for everyone to live through, if simply reading part of one dramatized is so difficult.
Things eventually come to a head for the kids when their mom suddenly announces that they don’t have to go visitations anymore. Heavenly Father, which is how his Mormon family refers to God, told her that it’s time for them “to be free from the hands of our enemy” and that he had shown her a better future, free of the court-ordered visitations as well as their relative poverty.
This involves the kids packing quickly and fleeing in her car, driving further and further out of town, staying first in motels, then with a friend and then, eventually, in the car itself. At the worst of it, they find themselves in the desert, parking wherever they can, and surviving off handfuls of crackers and jam.
The kids, who share their mom’s faith—if not her saint-like certainty and confidence in God—are at first on board, since they obviously hate visitations too, but they gradually grow more and more confused by their mom’s actions. Their faith in their mother and their faith in God carries them pretty far but eventually starts to break down.
One particularly worrying sign comes when their mom tells them not to talk about their location, as the car might be bugged.
This is apparently a fictionalized version of the events Corey, Sarah and their family actually endured, based on Egbert’s author’s note in the back of the book that details a few of the things that he changed, mostly to make for a more dramatic and streamlined telling of the story. The most obviously fictionalized part, however, is the climax.
Parked outside a Nevada brothel against Corey’s wishes—a devout Mormon Christian as well as a teenage boy, he has a great deal of anxiety about his own sexual thoughts—he finally has a crisis of faith and conscience. In his imagination, we see the God of his thoughts and prayers unmask himself as his mom, proclaiming, “I was never real.”
He wanders outside the car by himself, looking at the infinite stars, and is suddenly confronted by a strange celestial being—giving the title a secondary meaning; that’s her on the cover above—who acts as a sort of guide and sounding board for all of his doubts and fears and beliefs. And then he finds his grandmother’s letter, surreptitiously tucked into the back of his sketchbook, and finally reads it.
The entire sequence was basically a way of dramatizing his own complicated thought process.
By the sequence’s end, the police arrive and take his mom into custody, ending a month-long search, and take the kids away. It ends happily, or as happily as it could, anyway. It turns out their mom was given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and was likely projecting the reality of her own father onto that of the kids’ dad.
One can only imagine how hard it would have been to deal with a serious mental illness like that, especially for a person with a strong faith, and to figure out where to draw the line between which thoughts are real, which are the disease and which might be God. Even more so for children, watching from the outside.
The book ends happily—as happily as it could—with Egbert’s author’s note offering more details about what happened to the real Corey, Sarah and their family after the last panel of the graphic novel ends.
Egbert’s character design and rendering style here look similar to the soft, gentle work on his dozen or so children’s books—most of which, notably, have to do with faith; he seems to have emerged from the crucible of this traumatic event and all of his questioning with some form of faith intact.
These characters are all rather abstracted, with just little black dots for eyes, but Egbert is able to wring a great deal of emotion out of those dots, his characters all having a full range of emotions through their expressions, and readers can often see what’s going on in their heads through those expressions alone.
The art comes in a limited palette, mostly black and white (but with a lot of soft grays), with flesh-coloring for most of the people’s skin and a reddish orange for Corey and his mother’s hair, and when something needs to be accentuated.
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Egbert proves quite adept with the long format, dramatizing events in an ongoing, propulsive narrative, while providing necessary information in occasional, natural-feeling flashbacks. Some pivotal work is done in narration boxes but, for the most part, everything that is most important to the story seems to be told in the story.
The result is a book that feels like a book, Egbert not necessarily telling his readers his story so much as he is showing it to them in his comics. It’s a memoir that reads like a novel. Only, you know, in comics form.
My library catalogued with the non-fiction number for comics—741.5973—but placed it in our relatively small Young Adult non-fiction section, rather than with the mainstream comics in the much larger graphic novel section, which is where the majority of our comics collection resides.
This is probably the best call. It’s a potent work, one that should speak directly to young readers struggling with issues of growing up, from worrying about the place of sex in their lives and society to adapting the simpler faith of their childhoods to one that can survive the increasing pressures of adulthood, but it deals with some heady, heavy topics that younger readers won’t be ready to deal with yet.
Based on the importance of the subject matter and the strength of his work on it, one hopes this is the first of many graphic novels from the artist.
[Check out Esther Keller’s review of Visitations as well—Ed.]
Filed under: Reviews

About J. Caleb Mozzocco
J. Caleb Mozzocco has written about comics for online and print venues for a rather long time now. He lives in northeast Ohio, where he works as a circulation clerk at a public library by day.
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