How Do I Draw These Memories?

By Jonell Joshua

Life is precious. And Jonell Joshua has a life that sounds fun, challenging and purposeful. Except for just one thing. She and her brothers enjoy the small and large things. This is a family that knows what real love means. The family works to stay together while each navigating an individual life path by day. In short, gooshie-gooshie romantic love and puppy love that teenagers sometimes think is going to last forever during high school and the kind of love that really is full of real and everlasting love, kindness, patience and that thing that goes the extra mile when it knows it needs to and when it is right - that's what Jonell Joshua and her mother and father and brothers own. Real love.They are a joyful bunch who really know the meaning of making life and family memories and storing them in their heart and on the pages of this colorful and bright and what you would call a heartfelt young adult graphic memoir.

Short stories like Jordan! There's Diet Coke at the House! that come in-between bridal stories and stories from the details about Jonell's first sketchbook. Of course, each story has a perfect choice of an illustration to show what is going on in each segment of Jonell's family life. She tells the truth about her life and her personal memoir while weaving truth shows the uplift of the bright life. Starting out with the early memories of her brothers born in New Jersey, taking portrait photos, riding Big Wheels on the road with dad and later describes the families' move to Brooklyn, N.Y. as another drawing bright spot of interest on a page of the family adventure. "I even remember walking outside our building in Bushwick...I looked to my left and then I looked up. Up on the rooftop, there were birds flying. It looked like they might be pigeons. There was a Puerto Rican flag waving back and forth and all the birds were flying around. It was like the guy could control all the pigeons just by what he did with his flag."

The best story of the book outlines the story Jonell tells from the voice of her own mother about how her mother and father met and dated and got married. Jonell's father was working at a law firm at the time, and he loved taking Jonell's mother on dates to go out and eat Chinese food. Her mother and her father realized they were in love due to the sign of huge phone bills. Although her mother wore a modest wedding gown of $350 U.S. dollars for the wedding, Greg, Jonell's father surprised his bride-to-be with a Marquis wedding ring while on a date at yet another Chinese restaurant. The wedding date was June 18, 1988. They married at St. Paul's United Methodist Church. And they had 400 guests. "We had a buffet -style reception with fruit punch that came out of the fountain...after getting married, we got an apartment in Fords, New Jersey," wrote Jonell in a succinct journalism account about the union.