Book Review: This Might Surprise You - A Breast Cancer Story by Hayley Gullen

My pal Hayley has written a book - a graphic memoir about dealing with breast cancer. Graphic as in graphic-novel - although there are a large variety of sketched boobs dotted throughout the pages and some frank discussions of sex. I'm not very good with "medical stuff" - so I was quite proud of myself for only twice needing to take a break from reading it because I felt faint.

It is the most perfectly human book I've read in a while. The inner monologue will be intimately familiar to anyone who has sat nervously in a hospital waiting room. It is in turns funny, heartbreaking, devastating, and hopeful. The illustrations are lush. Soaring between the mundane nature of being stuck in a machine, to the surreal nature of your body conspiring against you. It expertly mixes the factual (what to take, when to take it, where to go) with the fanciful (how to visualise your oncologist catching you with a butterfly net).

This book is vital reading for anyone involved in the NHS. It presents a patient- person-centred view of everything that can go wrong on a patient's person's journey through the health system. From technobabbling doctors to outdated IT systems. It's a clear and punchy call for improved holistics. Every part of the system matters - especially when patients people are at their most vulnerable.

In a delightful meta-narrative, the book passes the eponymous Gullen-test which asks whether a character with cancer is cured by normal science or a miracle. In this case, it is lot (and lots) of drugs, machines, doctors, nurses, and chemicals.

People with cancer get bought a lot of books. This is a tight 180 pages exploring the melancholy and the joy which can accompany the journey.

Highly recommended.

Technical Details

This part is more of a technical review of the eBook. Firstly, it's all in black and white - which makes it suitable for reading on an eInk device.

It's also available as an ePub - rather than just a flattened PDF. That means the text is selectable, available for screen readers, and searchable.

The book weighs in at 156MB, which is a bit chunky and will be slow to open on some eReaders. The images are all 1134x1700 resolution which makes them gorgeous to look at. But they're saved in the rather inefficient JPEG format, at extremely high quality. Shifting the images to PNG would have reduced the filesize by at least a third, with no loss of quality.

Bafflingly, the publisher has fixed the height and width of every page using:

 HTML<meta content="width=444, height=665" name="viewport"/>

That's approximately the right aspect ratio, but far too small. Some eReaders will display the pages in a small box on the page, others might be prevented from zooming in. The CSS is also weirdly bloated and could do with being optimised.

None of this will spoil your enjoyment of a very fine book. It's just evidence that some publishers need to get better at the technical aspects of graphic novels!