Description: "Lady Sunflower is an achingly poignant collection written by Sierra Shuck-Sparer when she found herself grappling with the unimaginable: high-risk medulloblastoma. At the age of fifteen, Sierra was thrust into her harrowing battle against Gertrude (the name she gave her cancer). She faced relentless treatments and surgeries all while trying to retain her identity as a teenager heading into her college years. Sierra chronicled her journey through diagnosis, relapses, and treatment stages using a remarkable blend of heart-rending poetry, introspective essays and songs, zines, and curated playlists."--
Brief description:
Chloe Tyler fell in love with art in high school and within a matter of months, it became her entire life. Drawing with charcoals, painting with oils and acrylics, doing portraits, murals, figure drawing, she threw herself into anything she could get her hands on. Chloe attended the University of Georgia and studied fine art and graphic design.She graduated from college in 2019 with a BFA in fine arts and an emphasis in graphic design, and is now an artist living in Nashville, TN.
Review Quotes:
A young Knoxville, Tennessee, woman chronicles living with the life-threatening brain cancer she names Gertrude.
In 2018, bright, ambitious Shuck-Sparer, then 15 and a competitive swimmer and ice skater, was diagnosed with high-risk medulloblastoma, a brain cancer that required grueling surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy. After initially undergoing surgery and seven months of chemotherapy in Memphis, Sierra relapsed, endured another round of treatment during her senior year of high school, graduated on time, and then headed to Atlanta to attend Georgia Tech. When the Covid-19 pandemic sank her original dream of visiting Japan on a trip sponsored by the Make-a-Wish Foundation, she pivoted to using her wish to create this memoir of life with Gertrude, which she'd been chronicling on her Instagram account, kill.gertrude. This work is enlivened by wry comments on treatment protocols and practical tips for surviving them, along with Tyler's black-and-white illustrations. Rants and laments, rhymed and studded with bitter humor, give way to plangent sorrow for a lost future, like the fallen hair on her pillow, which Shuck-Sparer captures with a lint roller: "It comes right off, as if it is dust. // Somedays I feel like I am dust, / Fighting against the wind to stay where I am." By turns passionate, wistful, furious, heartbroken, and courageous, the author has a message for readers: "I want to put enough of myself into the world so that when I'm gone, you'll remember me." Mission accomplished.
Haunting. --Kirkus Reviews