Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars

November 14, 2022
A couple navigate their young son’s terminal illness in Louis’s painful but spirited graphic memoir debut. Before marrying, the idea of parenthood daunted Louis, who wonders, “What if I couldn’t protect my kid from all the dangerous, scary, sad things?” But when Louis and wife Emily bring home Ronan, Louis couldn’t be more delighted. Ronan’s “a pretty happy baby,” but his parents notice he isn’t hitting typical developmental milestones. Surpassing their worst fears, an ophthalmologist identifies signs of Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, and is normally fatal by age four. Tracking Ronin’s prognosis, each page is freighted with unbearable foreboding. Louis darts forward and backward in time, pursuing echoes and themes as he tries to make sense of a senseless grief. His principal subject, though, is the joy he felt being Ronan’s dad. Frivolous comic asides—dad jokes—dispense levity throughout, and Antal’s art balances the lighter tone, sometimes to disarming effect, as when Louis pushes past a retail aisle of childproofing gear, realizing he won’t need any. In this frank telling of a devastating ordeal, it’s the beauty of the too-brief loving moments that lingers.

Starred review from September 15, 2022
A heart-wrenching graphic memoir about losing a child to a rare neurological disorder. "This is not a story about grief," writes Louis about his son's battle with Tay-Sachs, an incurable disease. "It is just the story of a little boy who was only here for a short while. And what he was like. And what he meant to us." There's a fairy-tale sense of wonder to such narration, a balance of light and dark that matches the stars-and-space backdrop of Antal's illustrations. With tonal command and a penchant for understatement, the author doesn't pull any emotional punches, but neither does he wallow in tragedy. The artistry underscores the tone of the text, with whimsy and flights of fancy, whether soaring toward the stars or plunging into a dark night of the soul. "I knew there was something I needed to understand, and perhaps share, about my brief, intense, joyful, devastating parenting experience," writes the author at the beginning. He chronicles his journey from initial indifference about parenting to the emotional richness and bonding of early parenthood to the terrible news that Ronan would not have long to live, a fact that ravaged his parents and their marriage. Yet there is joy and even redemption within the elliptical sparseness of the narration, and Antal's illustrations reinforce the impact of the words and fill in some of the gaps. This is not a book narrowly focused on a readership of other parents facing such a rare disorder. Rather, Louis and Antal combine to create an impressive work that explores universal themes of mortality, parental love, selflessness, and resilience. "Being Ronan's father was the greatest thing that ever happened to me," writes the author. Readers will believe him wholeheartedly. A spare account of a short life that will leave readers feeling both uplifted and emotionally drained.

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Starred review from December 2, 2023

A loving couple's child arrives a few years into the marriage, welcomed enthusiastically. But the cheery youngster misses infant milestones, stops developing, and at nine months is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease. This genetic disorder deprives a new life of a critical enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells; Ronan will die before age three. In a double tragedy, fanciful writer Louis and his teacher wife Emily give themselves entirely up to the terminally ill Ronan, with toys, bedtime stories, and doctoring, but lose each other as well in the process and separate after their son's funeral. Louis relates how an "adrift in a sea of stars" fantasy soothed his own childhood, and Antal fills the story with sometimes puckish visual imagery in blue and black hues: a caricatured Heimlich maneuver-style poster to revive dying babies, an imagined toy train carrying off a laughing Ronan instead of a hearse, an inky figure for this "little-boy-shaped hole in the universe" that in Rick's fantasy is refused admission to school. VERDICT Ronan's lyrical, tragic story tells how death ends a life, not a relationship, and how forlorn lovers can savor their joy about those they love even while mourning their loss. Highly recommended.

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