The story reads like an immersive role-playing game where colorful characters, lavish landscapes, and harrowing challenges await you at every turn. “With Buzzing, Sattin and Hickman show that epic adventures hide in the most unlikely places. This is a nuanced and diverse coming-of-age story. I’m so excited for all of the readers who will discover it and see themselves in it.”- Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer: A Memoir Over the story, he builds confidence and community by leaning into his love of fantasy and drawing as a former fellow misfit teen artist, it was wonderful to watch him grow. Isaac is a teen with OCD suffers from near-constant intrusive thoughts, cleverly visualized here as bees with mean voices. “The power of a role-playing group can’t fix everything, but it goes a long way. Now Isaac needs to find a way to prove to himself, to his mother, and to the world that the way to quiet the noise in his head may have been inside him all along.

The strict therapy his mother insists on doesn’t seem to be working, but when a group of friends invites him to join their after-school role-playing game, the thoughts feel a little less loud, and the world feels a little brighter.īut Isaac’s therapist says that exposure to games can have negative effects on kids with OCD, and when his grades slip, his helicopter mother won’t let him play anymore. Isaac Itkin can’t get away from his thoughts.Īs a lonely twelve-year-old kid with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), everything from studying to looking in the mirror becomes a battle between him and a swarm of unhelpful thoughts. A moving middle grade graphic novel about friendship, belonging, and learning to love yourself despite the voices in your head.

Buzzing by Samuel Sattin