Button Pusher by Tyler Page

 Tyler Page joins the ranks of comic memoirists in this graphic novel of growing up with ADHD and family struggles.

The story starts with Tyler as an enthusiastic eight year old, greeting his friends and riding the bus to school. On his way to school, he pulls out a pocketknife he absentmindedly put in his backpack and cuts open the seat. Dragged to the principal's office, he's asked "why" he would do such a thing?

But Tyler doesn't know.

This typifies his struggles in the following pages as he tries to navigate school and an increasingly fraught family life. He's intelligent, good at art, and loves his family and friends, but he just can't control his impulses or keep his focus at the times when adults want him to. As the story of his childhood progresses, it's interwoven with doctor's visits, informational comics about ADHD and how research and diagnosis has changed over the years. In addition to trying to navigate the social landscape of school and handle different medications, Tyler also deals with his family issues, the constant fighting between his parents, and his father's uncontrolled rages. Tyler thoughtfully draws parallels, showing how he and his father struggled with many of the same issues, and how they chose different ways of dealing with their challenges.

The story ends as Tyler transitions to adulthood, starting with dropping his medication and an angry confrontation with his father when he is 16. He decides he's grown out of his ADHD and starts to build his own support network of friends, managing to reconcile to some extent with his father and foreshadowing his parent's divorce several years into the future. The last informational comic talks about dealing with ADHD as an adult and the changing concept of neurodiversity. An afterword talks about how he chose to write this memoir and fiction vs. nonfiction aspects.

This stands apart from the spate of recent graphic memoirs for kids in the inclusion of information about ADHD, its history and changing views. I appreciated this, as it is a good way of educating readers, whether or not they had ADHD, without expecting them to get all the information from context clues. If you have objections to graphic novels like Smile or Sunny, you're likely to get them here too; Tyler's father's rages are marked by explosive red flushes, broken dishes and furniture, and frequent use of grawlixes. There is no overt violence or swearing.

Verdict: This is a must-have graphic novel, not only hitting a popular trend of graphic memoirs, but thoughtfully explaining what it's like to grow up with neurodiversity and honestly portraying a strugglin family. Highly recommended.

ISBN: 9781250758347; Published April 2022 by First Second; Borrowed from another library in my consortium