Hmmm… What might have been a book of universal interest however descends too early into a cleavage of other stuff. For this is nothing like purely being about breasts, it's about the people around the author, from those sharing the genetics that make breast cancers more likely, to those others who all get their look-see onto these pages. I'm not for one minute pretending every page should have had a mammary focus, but the book's scope was so broad, from first bra to first car to first post-op scar, that it became a little tiresome. Perhaps I just didn't take to the delivery – all of the panels, in their 2x2 rigid grid, and their authorial caption on top, and the way sometimes you could get by with just reading those and yet for others you had to squint to the smaller in-image dialogue bubbles.

Another thing to note is the question of target audience – someone wanting to learn about 'how to survive a mastectomy' will want the last chunks of this book and probably not the rest; someone wanting a graphic novel biography because that's the genre they read will probably know what's coming for the large part of the last third, and like me see this lose its way before then. All told, and it seems a ridiculous thing to say when it's a book about a sexually charged, oft-judged part of one's anatomy being hacked off by surgeons, this felt just too personal to the creator and her loved ones. All power and respect to them, but I didn't find them of enough interest to justify this lack of concision.

A substantial, affecting memoir in unique style, covering key elements of Hayden's life as student, mother, daughter, and cancer survivor through looking at how female body parts change with life events.