Our Take
Feeding Ghosts is the kind of graphic memoir that expands what the form can hold. Hulls isn't just illustrating her family's story, she's using the density of her linework to visually enact the weight of inherited trauma, and it works in a way prose alone couldn't. Readers who loved the generational reckoning of Crying in H Mart will recognize the same hunger to understand a difficult mother through the lens of culture and food and distance, though Hulls pushes further back, into her grandmother's history as well. Fans of Persepolis will find a similar marriage of political history and personal upheaval rendered in stark visual language, while anyone who appreciated the psychological unraveling in The Best We Could Do will find familiar territory in Hulls' willingness to sit with mental illness without flinching or moralizing. What sets this book apart is its refusal to offer easy resolution. Hulls doesn't pretend that a decade of research and drawing fully untangles what her grandmother and mother endured, and that honesty is what makes the ending land as hard as it does. This is a demanding read, both visually and emotionally, but it rewards patience with real insight into how trauma travels through families and what it might take to finally set it down.
