HOW TO HOLD A COCKROACH

A brief novella for all ages about looking within for better understanding of others.

In Maxwell’s debut work, a little boy narrates his encounters with a series of fears and frustrations. As the book opens, for example, he’s eating dinner when he’s confronted with a “big, brown, and disgusting” cockroach crawling on the table. He viscerally dislikes cockroaches and loudly commands it to go away and leave him alone, after which “a little miracle” occurs: He realizes that his opinion of roaches was based solely on what others around him thought of them. “He questioned, for the first time in a very long time, how much he actually knew about cockroaches,” Maxwell writes. “He looked at the cockroach with curiosity….He began to feel compassion.” As the story advances, he encounters many other such things that prompt the same “little miracle,” including intangibles such as love or the future. About other people, he notes, “He started to realize that he had been mad at people not for what they were, but for what he had believed them to be.” Over the course of the book, Maxwell effectively repeats a similar formula as the boy experiences his epiphanies, resulting in broadening self-awareness, greater compassion, and a wider worldview. Daigle’s pleasing and often moving full-color ink-and-watercolor illustrations range from smaller, intimate images of the boy and those he meets to more elaborate full-page artworks. The simple, overarching message of these stories and images is one of empathy and self-examination, and their execution in these pages will make it appealing to both adults and younger readers.

A thoughtful illustrated work about a boy gaining wisdom about the world around him.