Review: "Dear Dad" by Jay Jay Patton

Dear Dad by Jay Jay Patton
With Kiara Valdez and Markia Jenai
Published September 2024 via Graphix
★★★

A graphic memoir about growing up with a parent who is incarcerated—and finding ways to connect both before and after that parent's release.

I picked this up because...well, mostly because the US system of incarceration is so broken, and it seems important to read people's stories about it. Dear Dad is told from a perspective I haven't heard much from—a child growing up with a parent in prison—and touches on the importance of facilitating connection between people who are incarcerated and the loved ones out in the world.

My absolute favorite thing about this (aside from it being from a perspective that I haven't seen much of) is that Patton's father's prison sentence is not the point. Why he was in prison is not the point. What is the point is that prison took him away from his family, and staying in contact was a struggle.

What I did want more of, though...well, first of all, the description of the book is inaccurate. The description says ...the two have sent each other numerous letters. Jay Jay's letters can take weeks or months to reach her dad, and some never even get delivered. What's it going to be like having Dad home? But in the book itself, I don't think we ever see those long pauses, or the real struggle to stay in touch. In fact, their written communication is shown mostly in a brief flashback, and then it's on to Patton's father being home, the family moving to Florida, and Patton's father teaching her coding in part so that they can work together on an app that helps youth better connect with their incarcerated parents.

Patton was young when her father was in prison, so this makes some sense—the letters that I as an adult write are much more complex than the letters that I wrote as a child, and I'm guessing that there was limited material to mine in the letters that Patton wrote, or that her father wrote back. It might have been interesting to see some of what Patton's parents discussed in their own letters; I'm thinking of Mainline Mama here, and of the author working and working and working to maintain her relationship while her partner was in prison. Arguments strung out over weeks rather than minutes (or sometimes gotten over before it's time for the next retort), nobody there to share the physical burden of parenting, your partner having to learn the ins and outs of in-person parenting when your child is old enough to be resentful of a new person stepping in.

Dear Dad touches on this, a little—there's one scene in which Patton objects to her father laying down rules, but that's kind of it, because the focus of the book ends up being more on coding. And make no mistake, that's also great! Girls should have more opportunities to learn coding, and it's frankly pretty awesome to see someone getting out of prison and, it seems, thriving. It's just not really what I expected the book to be about.

Oh, the art—not a style that I'm particularly fond of (a little more comic-y than I like in a graphic novel/memoir, where I almost always want more visual detail), but it gets the job done, especially for a middle grade readership.

One quick note: There are some statistics at the end about how many kids in the US have a parent in prison (and how many adults in prison have kids on the outside), but the statistics don't talk about the disproportionate incarceration of Black men in the US, or the staggering difficulties that many newly released individuals face reintegrating, finding a job, getting used to being on the outside again. I'm guessing that was a deliberate choice, but just noting here that if you're reading this as a starting point it's worth diving deeper.