This book is not about queerness or transness but seamlessly includes both, and steers away from typical LGBT “lesson” books where the path to fulfillment ends with acceptance rather than some other complex goal. This is a beautiful graphic novel with a unique plot and beautifully illustrated characters. Maybe witches can do good in this world, and maybe Snap could be one of them. As Snap learns more about Jacks and her strange ways, she learns they have more in common than she thought, and that their connection goes back decades. Jacks might be grumpy, but she’s not dangerous. She knows everything there is to know about witches, and this Crocs-wearing senior couldn’t be one of them.
When Jacks agrees to help Snap take care of the possums in exchange for assistance with her “work,” Snap isn’t afraid to enter into a deal. That’s what drives Snap to bring a crate of orphaned possums to Jacks’s house, so that the old crone can look after them. In fact, she’s sure Jacks isn’t a witch, since she took care of Snap’s dog when he was injured. Snapdragon-Snap, for short-isn’t afraid of the witch living in her town. Full of magic and humor, this intersectional, layered tale offers joyful and affirming depictions of social outsiders and comfortably complicated families. In bright, dynamic art, Leyh packs Snapdragon's world with an array of wonderful characters, full of quirks and contradictions, who represent a variety of ethnicities, sexualities, and gender expressions. She also discovers that Jacks is deeply connected to her own family and just might be an actual witch. As the self-possessed girl develops an interest in vertebrate anatomy, she spends time in her trailer park home evolving a meaningful friendship with trans neighbor Lu, honing an interest in frightening tales, and navigating the fallout of her hardworking single mother's most recent relationship. The purported witch, an older woman named Jacks who raced motorcycles in her youth, makes a deal with Snapdragon Jacks will help Snapdragon care for the possums if Snapdragon helps Jacks with her work harvesting road kill, then cleaning and selling the articulated skeletons online. The next day, encountering a dead opossum mother and her living babies, Snapdragon takes them back to the house for help. When middle schooler Snapdragon's dog goes missing, Snapdragon dares to enter the house of a reputed witch and finds the hound recuperating from an accident.
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