The results are in! The winner of our poll – and the book we will discuss on December 2, 2026 – is Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls. We used STAR Voting again this month, and seventeen members voted in the poll. Of our four book choices, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? and Feeding Ghosts received the most stars in the scoring round and advanced to the automatic runoff round. In the runoff round, each member’s “vote” goes to the book to which they gave more stars. Their vote is recorded as “equal preference vote” if they gave both finalists the same number of stars. This month, three people gave both finalists the same number of stars, and both of our finalists received seven votes! Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir won the tiebreaker, because it received more stars in the scoring round. Thank you to everyone who voted in our poll!
If you are a member of One Drink Minimum Book Club and didn't hear about the poll or otherwise have not been receiving Meetup messages, we highly recommend that you join our email mailing list - it's easy to join, and far more reliable than the Meetup messaging system. Just send an email to Chris and Gary at one.drink.minimum.book@gmail.com and tell us your name on Meetup so we know who is who. Once we verify your membership in Meetup, we'll add you to our mailing list and send you an email to confirm that it's done. Your email address will remain private as we send all messages blind cc.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOKS CRITICS CIRCLE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE • WINNER OF THE 2025 ANISFIELD WOLF PRIZE • WINNER OF THE LIBBY AWARD FOR BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Time, Forbes, NPR, Minnesota Star Tribune, LitHub, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Chicago Public Library
An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.
In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.
Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
—description from Macmillan Publishers
"Filled with compelling characters and haunting illustrations . . . [Feeding Ghosts] is a chronicle of journeys made by the author’s grandmother and mother from Suzhou and Shanghai to St. Paul, Minn., and the San Francisco Bay Area."
—Robert Ito, The New York Times
"Revelatory . . . [Hulls's] graphic memoir traces, with devastating emotional acuity, the line between the history of China under Mao Zedong—a stretch of nearly unfathomable death and political upheaval—and the ghosts of her family’s past that she eventually unearthed . . . Hulls’ book is a breathtaking portrait of this lineage of trauma. Enlivened by her hauntingly vivid drawings, in which the past is often a surrealist, spectral presence constantly intruding upon the present."
—Brandon Yu, San Francisco Chronicle
“While Feeding Ghosts belongs to a long tradition of subgenre-defining graphic nonfiction including Fun Home and Persepolis, Hulls’s narrative voice is uniquely captivating because she combines her cartoonist quirkiness with both a fine artist’s eye for page composition and a willingness to dive into dense subject matter without grasping for easy closure.”
—Martin Dolan, Los Angeles Review of Books
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