Review by Booklist Review
Fresh out of nursing school, Czerwiec took a job in an innovative AIDS care unit at Chicago's Illinois Masonic Medical Center at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Unit 371 became a community in which physicians and nurses bent the traditional boundaries to provide support and comfort for their patients in their last days. The ward was a surprisingly cheerful environment, where patients felt safe and accepted. With the advent of retroviral therapy in the late 1990s, fewer patients were admitted, and the unit closed. Feeling a loss of mission, Czerwiec turned to drawing comics, leading to this graphic memoir in which she depicts her time on the ward and shares oral histories of the patients and doctors. Czerwiec's drawings are crude and childlike, if clear and effective, and she too often conveys information with huge blocks of text in off-putting speech balloons. Even so, her chronicle reminds us that the era was marked as much by courage and compassion as it was by the tragedy of lives lost too soon.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Czerwiec, a registered nurse and cofounder of Graphic Medicine, weaves together multiple threads of nonfiction narratives in this profound graphic memoir of her early years as a nurse and her formative time working at an HIV/AIDS care unit starting in 1994. Around this central strand of a caregiver's experience, Czerwiec winds personal stories about patients, facts about the day-to-day job of a nurse, and in-depth medical explanations of HIV/AIDS, its effects on health, its treatments, and much more. In the sudden devastation of the AIDS crisis, the LGBTQ people most affected by it were abandoned to one another's care. Rather than the usual medical tales of professional-minded strangers treating faceless victims, Czerwiec's vignettes become about bonding intimately over suffering and death, watching the community be decimated at the same time as mutual nursing was building connections. Some of the pages are heart-wrenching, and the story has the potential to be supremely depressing, but Czerwiec wrings hope from the honesty of her simple, cheerful cartooning style. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
