Cannon ~ Lee Lai

I loved Lee Lai’s first graphic novel, Stone Fruit, so when I heard that her newest book had won a lot of awards I determined to keep my eye out for it at the library. I finally got it the other day, and it is really good. It’s about a cook in Montreal who is heading to a nervous breakdown (no spoilers; you see the results in the first pages). Lai does wonderful things with visual metaphor. In Cannon, she uses magpies surrounding Cannon to signify building anxiety. Cannon gets interrupted a lot, too, and Lai uses overlapping speech bubbles to visceral effect. There’s also a moment where one character’s speech is actually obscured by his own head, because Cannon isn’t hearing what he’s saying but what he’s demanding of her. The best comics are cinematic, and that’s true of Cannon. The story’s pacing is perfect, taking its time to introduce and flesh out the characters without dragging anywhere. The relationship between Cannon and her best friend, Trish, captures the way lifelong…