Amy Santiago is one of my favorite fictional characters. She is a police officer on the show Brooklyn 99. Throughout the series, her character grew from a brown-nosing know-it-all to a fleshed out comedic delight. As a brown-nosing know-it-all, her character arc meant a lot to me. Hopefully, as we mature, we become more aware of how we are perceived by others and are able to reign in our more irritating attributes.
I feel like Ruth, as portrayed in Becoming RGB, never managed to do this. She was PERFECT! And I adore RGB the human. And I actually really enjoyed this graphic biography. But I never felt like I got to like this Ruth. I think that the problem is that the secondary characters, primarily her mother and husband, were so fleshed out, where she was just brilliant, hard working and driven. Even Antonin Scalia seemed more like a real human than she did.
This is not to say that this book isn’t fantastic, it is! It gives the facts of RGB’s life in an interesting narrative, I loved the look into her childhood and her marriage and the trajectory of her career. I know it is asking a lot of this format to bring her to life.
Well, it is time for the SHUT MY MOUTH section of this response! I am a person who usually just focuses on text and doesn’t give much time to the pictures. Well, I just flipped back through the book to see if there was a part where I felt Ruth’s spirit on the page and I looked at the illustrations and there she was! The picture of her as a young mother sitting exhausted in a chair brings back the exact feeling of being a young mother sitting exhausted in a chair. Kudos to Whitney Gardner for making her emotions so visible.
If you will excuse me, I need to go back and reread this with my picture glasses on!
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