Carol Tyler - You'll Never Know - Part One

I didn’t buy this for a while but then I saw that Rob Clough had mentioned it as his favourite book of the year so far so I ordered myself a copy.

I’m very glad I did. It’s mainly the wartime biography of Carol Tyler’s father Chuck Tyler. I can’t help comparing it to ‘Alan’s War’ by Guilbert but they are very different books though both about average American soldiers in World War 2. ‘Alan’s War’ is purely the memoir of Alan Cope with very little emotional input from Guilbert, he wants to just write down Alan’s memories without adding his own thoughts and feelings. Carol’s book adds loads of her own thoughts about everything, how she found out her dad’s experiences, what was going on with her and her family at the time, what it all means to her. She kind of starts the book by accident to try and take her mind off her break up with her husband, the cartoonist Justin Green, and to make a nice photo album for her dad too. This is just the first part with her dad going through training, meeting her mother at the training camp, falling in love and getting married, and then being shipped out to North Africa. Something horrible happened to him in Italy but it hasn’t reached that yet, and it’s not certain whether he will want to talk about it at all as there are lots of memories he doesn’t want to think about.

The drawing is brilliant, with watercolour washes. Carol puts the panels in the middle of the pages and does a lot of using the spaces around the panels and the edges of the pages to add a lot of extra feeling to the pages. She also does some lovely full page drawings.

I really liked it and I will definitely get the next part of the story, I hope it comes out soon. Oh yeah, if you are looking for it to buy on amazon its only under C Tyler as the authors name, not Carol Tyler, took me a while to find it…