Can of Worms by Catherine Doherty

Although she does not use her real full name (the character's name is Catherine Margaret Flaherty), this is the autobiographical story of Catherine Doherty searching for her birth mother.

This was a mostly wordless graphic novel.  Catherine discovers she's adopted as a child and much later as an adult she begins the search for her birth mother.

One of the things I enjoyed about this was seeing the process Catherine went through in her search.  She began her search in the mid 90s, and it took her three years to track her birth mother down.  It involved hours or research at the library looking a microfiche and library indexes and phone books.  Now, you'd search for people on Facebook or spend some money to do a classified person search and done.

I did find the story a little confusing at some points because it was wordless.  There were some frames that I wasn't totally clear what was going on or what Catherine was thinking about.  When Catherine first contacted her birth mother, the woman denied she'd ever had a child, then a year later she contacted Catherine and they met.  At the end, there was a letter that seemed to suggest that she wasn't eager to meet again, but maybe that wasn't true.  Again, it just wasn't clear what was going on with the birth mother.

Overall though I thought it was a good story and fascinating to follow Catherine on her search.  The art was sketch like and not very detailed, which I think was part of why some frames were unclear.