How to Draw a Secret | Review

How to Draw a Secret
Writer/artist: Cindy Chang
Allida/HarperCollins; $24.99
Publisher’s age rating: 8-12 years

Twelve-year-old Cindy seems like a pretty normal, happy-go-lucky kid, one with a special aptitude for art. But her family has a secret, one she has been keeping from even her best friends at school for four years now: Her father left her family and moved back to Taiwan, presumably for work.

Cindy’s strict mother insists she and her sisters keep his absence a secret from everyone outside the family, even when it means telling obvious and outrageous lies to the likes of, say, a plumber who comes to work on a drain at their house. In fact, it’s become such a taboo topic that Cindy barely seems to understand what happened herself.

The family secret becomes more immediate and distressing for her when two things happen.

First, her art teacher wants her class to enter an art competition, the theme of which is “What Family Means to Me,” meaning Cindy will have to somehow present her family in a better, hopefully perfect light, all while keeping their secret. (This is, of course, where the title comes from.)

Second, and more urgently, her grandmother dies, and Cindy, her mother and her sisters will have to travel to Taiwan for the funeral, where they will face their father again for the first time in years…and maybe Cindy can finally talk to him about why he left, and if he’s ever coming back.

When they finally reunite, things are strange and strained, and then Cindy’s dad drops a real bombshell, the secret behind the secret, the reason he left, and the reason he’s never coming back. This shatters Cindy’s worldview and forces her to confront the way she defines her family and her place in it, big feelings she tries to work out in her art project while she’s still a world away from her home and regular life in America.

Chang, the real, grown-up Cindy who is here telling a fictionalized version of her own memories, presents those feelings clearly and effectively, in a manner that should be easy for young readers to understand and relate to.

Her art is quite simple in design and rendering, though she shows special facility with communicating the emotions and thoughts of her characters in their highly readable expressions.

She also draws Cindy’s art at several points throughout the book; sometimes, young Cindy works in a highly realistic style that looks like a striking departure from everything else in the book, while at other times she draws in a doodly style that looks like a more amateurish, less sophisticated version of Chang’s own style…which is, of course, appropriate, given that Cindy is the young Chang.

A well-drawn, well-told complex family drama viewed through the eyes of the youngest participant, How to Draw a Secret is an appealing and ultimately uplifting graphic memoir for young readers. In fact, it reads a little like Chang’s own extensive answer to the art project the Cindy character is faced with in the book, drawing “What Family Means to Me.”

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