REVIEW: Dear Dad: Growing Up with a Parent in Prison and How We Stayed Connected (nonfiction graphic novel) by Jay Jay Patton, with Kiara Valdez & Markia Jenai

Dear Dad: Growing Up with a Parent in Prison and How We Stayed Connected is a graphic novel memoir. I bought my copy new.

Review:

In this graphic memoir, Jay Jay Patton talks about what it was like growing up with a father in prison, how the two of them stayed connected during that time, and the work the two of them did on the Photo Patch Foundation, an app designed to help children more easily stay connected with an incarcerated parent.

Patton's father was incarcerated from when she was age 3 to about age 10. She was only able to see him a couple times during that period, and calls to her dad's prison were expensive. They wrote each other as often as they could and Patton's father, who learned coding while in prison, would send her math puzzles to solve.

About halfway through the volume, Patton's father came home, and the whole family moved to Florida. The rest of the story was about Patton's efforts to adjust to her new life, her own budding interest in coding, her father's work on the Photo Patch website, and her own work on the Photo Patch app.

By the end, this kind of felt like an extension of Photo Patch marketing efforts. I wished it had stayed more focused on the relationship between Patton and her father. This felt a bit surface-level, and I was left with a few questions that were never answered.

Extras:

Photographs of Jay Jay and her dad, Antoine, and a little info about the Photo Patch foundation.