7-Imp’s 7 Kicks #591: Featuring Soosh
June 17th, 2018 by jules
there’s nothing we can’t do.”
In honor of Father’s Day, here’s a peek inside Dad By My Side (Little, Brown, May 2018), written and illustrated by Soosh. Soosh is a self-taught artist from Europe (from a “country that doesn’t exist anymore,” she writes in the book’s closing author’s note), and this is her debut picture book.
This is a series of illustrations of a young girl and her father, spending their days together — the girl noting the many ways in which her father makes her feel safe and comforted. Soosh creates the girl’s father as “deliberately big,” she writes in that same author’s note …
“… much bigger than the figure of the little girl, his daughter, because this is how she sees him — and this is how many of us see our heroes or parents (which, if we are lucky, are the same thing). His beard makes me think of something ancient, strong, solid. He is someone who is there just because: to love you without any reason, unconditionally and forever. …”
“Honestly, I was resistant to doing a childhood memoir. I feel like there are a lot of them these days — and good ones. The world didn’t need one from me. My publisher asked me to at least think about it, and I did, crankily. Crank crank crank. But as soon as the camp angle occurred to me, all my crankiness went out the window. I knew I could make a funny book that would be a blast to draw and be different from what’s out there. I’m always telling people about the outhouse. The outhouse needed to be immortalized!”
