Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars: A Graphic Memoir

A loving couple’s child arrives a few years into the marriage, welcomed enthusiastically. But the cheery youngster misses infant milestones, stops developing, and at nine months is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease. This genetic disorder deprives a new life of a critical enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells; Ronan will die before age three. In a double tragedy, fanciful writer Louis and his teacher wife Emily give themselves entirely up to the terminally ill Ronan, with toys, bedtime stories, and doctoring, but lose each other as well in the process and separate after their son’s funeral. Louis relates how an “adrift in a sea of stars” fantasy soothed his own childhood, and Antal fills the story with sometimes puckish visual imagery in blue and black hues: a caricatured Heimlich maneuver-style poster to revive dying babies, an imagined toy train carrying off a laughing Ronan instead of a hearse, an inky figure for this “little-boy-shaped hole in the universe” that in Rick’s fantasy is refused admission to school.