The Talk

Gr 10 Up–Each of the four narrators take turns with dedications: “for Breonna Taylor, for Freddie Gray, for Trayvon Martin, for Ahmaud Arbery...for Tamir Rice...for Walter Scott...,” building furious speed and overlapping names until their voices merge into a cacophonous, shocking witnessing to Black murder. Those sobering 30 seconds set the tone for Bell’s mega-award-winning 2023 graphic memoir, extraordinarily adapted for audio with Bell as primary narrator, his young son as himself, and actors Bradford and DeMerritt creating a significant cast of parents, teachers, friends, colleagues; additional background scoring and archival recordings (featuring political figures, including George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump), chillingly enhance the stupendous production. Bell, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for “beautiful and daring editorial cartoons that took on issues affecting disenfranchised communities, calling out lies, hypocrisy and fraud in the political turmoil surrounding the Trump administration,” seems urgently relevant with the 2025 return of that administration.