AP – Usually when I see a book described as an “ambitious debut” I read it as a cop-out. Isn’t a debut inherently ambitious? What does that even mean?

The Skunks is what that means. And Fiona Warnick makes it look effortless.

A coming-of-age novel with a quarter-life-crisis thrown in, The Skunks is told in a stream of consciousness with a cynical sort of oddball humor that’s completely Warnick’s own.

Reading The Skunks is like drinking a cool glass of water on a hot day – it’s nothing particularly earth-shattering, but it’s wholly necessary, gratifying and gone before you know it.

The story is largely told from Isabel’s point of view. She’s a recent college grad who has returned to her hometown with no real plans for the future. And one day, while house-sitting, she sees three baby skunks in the yard. The perfect antidote to her obsession with boys: an obsession with skunks.

Isabel’s just trying to do better in a world buzzing with diametrically opposing views of what that means. Her days are interspersed with fairytale-like skunk chapters.

You can take the secondary story of the skunks as something that’s happening alongside Isabel’s story, or as something Isabel is writing to better make sense of her own life. It’s also possible that it’s just a really lovely story from the point of view of a skunk, which so happens to intersect occasionally with a human named Isabel.

The result is an unabashedly honest character study, humanising and equalising, in which skunks are just as much a part of the story as people. And by the end of it, you can’t help but have a new appreciation for both species.

It’s weird. It’s fresh. It’s a big bet that people will go along for this ride. In a word, it’s ambitious. And it pays off.

Warnick peppers the story with fresh imagery, similes and metaphors: Isabel describes her friend as having an internal rain gauge that’s always full, whereas everyone else’s leaks, leaving them craving a thunderstorm.

The author also has a knack for contrasting literary beauty with the everyday, like when she describes the skunks’ tails swishing in unison “like a ballet, or a windshield wiper”.

The novel is filled with moments that are profound despite their mundanity – or could be profound if you look at it metaphorically – or just random thoughts and moments, a gentle ribbing of the reader for trying to find meaning in every detail.

But, if you can just sit back and enjoy it, the pages breeze by almost without notice. Warnick’s smooth style and the lack of formal structure make the free-flow story fly by like you’ve been swept up in a jet flow.

Who knew a quarter-life crisis could be so engaging and delightful? Who knew Skunks were so charming and thoughtful? This book passed like a dream, and was over before I knew it. – Donna Edwards

AP – When Tessa Hulls sets out to tell her family’s story, she’s feeding their ghosts in the best way she’s learned how: by pulling them into the light.

Hulls’ graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts covers three generations of women, starting with her grandmother, Sun Yi, who herself was once a bestselling author of a memoir.

As Sun Yi withdraws into a spiral of hospitalisations and mental illness, the story picks up through Sun Yi’s daughter, Rose, until we reach the author herself, Rose’s daughter, as she pieces together their past to make better sense of the reverberating wounds that have threatened to drown each of them in matrilineal succession.

From Sun Yi’s roots in China to Tessa Hulls’ in California, it’s clear the story is going to address generational trauma right out of the gate. But you can rest assured there’s a profound sense of closure waiting at the end.

Despite the extreme weight of the story, the density of the historical context and the way every bit of space is utilised to communicate pictorially or verbally, that information is surprisingly digestible – and even nourishing.

With this high level of approachability, Hulls conveys the kind of historical details that turn staggering and unimaginable numbers into a reality you can feel.

Immensely interesting family history aside, Tessa has lived her own exciting life, including a season working at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Her explosive joy in the freedom of that vastness beams from the page.

The art is simple – cartoons drawn with black strokes on white paper – but what it conveys is so much more intricate. Panels often bleed into one another as if the gutters that divide them are mere suggestions, allowing for layered illustrations rich in metaphor.

Hulls visually represents trauma as ghosts in her bones, emanating from her, her mother and her grandmother, often intermingling like smoke; veins of their shared history branching out from their bodies as a physical representation of their emotional interconnectivity.

Then there are these beautiful spreads that echo earlier imagery, reverberating without subtlety or fanfare.

As the pieces fall into place and healing and understanding take root, the rib cage once gushing with ghosts now bursts with tree branches reaching toward the sky.

Feeding Ghosts is courageously and heartbreakingly bare, and Hulls’ attempt to present it all in a subjective manner only heightens the memoir’s emotional impact.

Her words narrate the story while the art carries the weight of the emotions. And the author pauses more than once to remind the reader that a memoir is curated, and therefore only a slice of the truth.

At the same time, hers is deeply grounded in historical fact. Pointing out when she takes artistic license only strengthens the story’s trustworthiness. – Donna Edwards