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BIOGRAPHIES
Yelchin, Eugene

I Wish I Didn't Have to Tell You This: A Graphic Memoir

432 pp. | Candlewick | September, 2025 | Trade ISBN 9781536215533 $22.99 | Ebook ISBN 9781536227321 $22.99
(1) YA This graphic memoir, a sequel to The Genius Under the Table (rev. 9/21) but for a teen audience, picks up in 1980 Leningrad, with Yelchin’s early adulthood. Yevgeny (as he was then known), who’s obsessed with Americans, meets American student Libby while showing his art at an illegal exhibition and sneaks away with her during a raid by the KGB. Yevgeny starts out with some naiveté about the political and antisemitic danger around him, but that changes with the “accidental” death of a Jewish friend denied permission to emigrate. He and Libby agree to marry, both out of love and so Yevgeny can emigrate himself, but the long process of obtaining a marriage license and then an exit visa drags on through difficult years. Yevgeny avoids the draft by working as a theater designer in Siberia near a nuclear plant, is eventually drafted (not without putting up a fight), and finds himself in a psychiatric hospital, where he is injected with drugs that affect his memory. Tension builds throughout, with the varying degrees of sharpness in the black-and-white panel illustrations perfectly matching that mood and reflecting the murkiness of what Yevgeny understands. Though the stakes are high, this political and artistic coming-of-age story has plenty of broadly relatable moments of indecision, stubbornness, frustration, and (often dark) humor, as its young subject figures out who he is, where he wants to be, and how to get there.
Reviewer: Shoshana Flax | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2025

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