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Everything in Color: A Love Story
Interrogating her own upbringing in an evangelical community, Stephanie Stalvey weaves a story of faith, alienation, romance and acceptance, in this beautifully painted graphic memoir. Perfect for fans of Blankets by Craig Thompson and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.
"Everything was either black or white. Pure or impure."
Stephanie grew up in an evangelical community where sin was inescapable, her body was a temptation, and desire was something to be feared. She was convinced that her thoughts couldn't be trusted, therefore obedience was paramount. She was only safe if she believed the "right things" about God.
But as she built a life of her own, fell in love with James, and became a mother, the complexities of the human experience became impossible to ignore. Was God truly so exacting and judgmental? Could faith exist without shame? Could love be both passionate and pure? Her connection to James- honest, aching, and sensual- became a safe place for her worldview to expand and grow.
Through striking prose and beautiful mixed-media illustrations, Stalvey takes us on an emotional journey of faith, romance, motherhood, and loss. With tenderness and honesty, she unravels the fear and guilt woven into her past, reclaims her sense of self, and shows us how to embrace a love that is healing, transformative, and wholly one's own.
"Everything was either black or white. Pure or impure."
Stephanie grew up in an evangelical community where sin was inescapable, her body was a temptation, and desire was something to be feared. She was convinced that her thoughts couldn't be trusted, therefore obedience was paramount. She was only safe if she believed the "right things" about God.
But as she built a life of her own, fell in love with James, and became a mother, the complexities of the human experience became impossible to ignore. Was God truly so exacting and judgmental? Could faith exist without shame? Could love be both passionate and pure? Her connection to James- honest, aching, and sensual- became a safe place for her worldview to expand and grow.
Through striking prose and beautiful mixed-media illustrations, Stalvey takes us on an emotional journey of faith, romance, motherhood, and loss. With tenderness and honesty, she unravels the fear and guilt woven into her past, reclaims her sense of self, and shows us how to embrace a love that is healing, transformative, and wholly one's own.
528 pages, Hardcover
Published April 28, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 140 reviews
May 3, 2026
So I read this in a day, because I couldn’t put it down! If you’ve experienced high control religion like much of American evangelicalism, you’ll deeply relate to this story. I felt seen and spoken for! The use of black and white to convey the stuffy, binary thinking of fundamentalism vs color for the openness and complexity/beauty of critical thinking fits the pages perfectly and works so well for a graphic novel.
Truly one of the best autobiographical graphic novels I’ve ever read.
Truly one of the best autobiographical graphic novels I’ve ever read.
August 22, 2025
Absolutely gorgeous art style! In an autobiographical graphic novel, Stephanie Stalvey explores her black-and-white fundamentalist upbringing and contrasts it with a new, richer understanding of the world. She reflects on the past with kindness, noting the good intentions and love of those around her even as she acknowledges the pain and wounds of the system in which she grew up. She moves back and forth between her black-and-white memories and colorful scenes of her family today, musing on a mother's love and the joy of children and childhood, morphing into a discussion on love, religion, and hope. This book broke me, in the best way possible. Stalvey could have been illustrating scenes from my life throughout this text, and I found her musings and illustrations wonderfully freeing, imaging a way forward based on love and security. This book really resonated with me, particularly reflecting on the messaging being pushed in religious books and in youth groups during the early 2000s, as well as how motherhood recolors ones perception of the world.
August 11, 2025
Stephanie grew up in an evangelical household. She was brought up to believe in eternal Hellfire. Throughout her childhood she was led to believe that she was a sinner, that everything she did would be judged by God. She struggles to find the balance between her upbringing and the woman she’s growing into. As someone who went to church and bible studies consistently, her break from the church and the people she thought would love her unconditionally, was an incredibly difficult decision. This was a fantastic, heart-wrenching retelling of what Stephanie had to go through and still battles against.
As someone who also grew up in an evangelical household and has left that religion, this one really hit home. I cannot express how much it is worth the read. It will be immediately purchased upon release for my best friend.
#ThxNetGalley #StephanieStalvey #EverythinginColor
Merged review:
Stephanie grew up in an evangelical household. She was brought up to believe in eternal Hellfire. Throughout her childhood she was led to believe that she was a sinner, that everything she did would be judged by God. She struggles to find the balance between her upbringing and the woman she’s growing into. As someone who went to church and bible studies consistently, her break from the church and the people she thought would love her unconditionally, was an incredibly difficult decision. This was a fantastic, heart-wrenching retelling of what Stephanie had to go through and still battles against.
As someone who also grew up in an evangelical household and has left that religion, this one really hit home. I cannot express how much it is worth the read. It will be immediately purchased upon release for my best friend.
#ThxNetGalley #StephanieStalvey #EverythinginColor
As someone who also grew up in an evangelical household and has left that religion, this one really hit home. I cannot express how much it is worth the read. It will be immediately purchased upon release for my best friend.
#ThxNetGalley #StephanieStalvey #EverythinginColor
Merged review:
Stephanie grew up in an evangelical household. She was brought up to believe in eternal Hellfire. Throughout her childhood she was led to believe that she was a sinner, that everything she did would be judged by God. She struggles to find the balance between her upbringing and the woman she’s growing into. As someone who went to church and bible studies consistently, her break from the church and the people she thought would love her unconditionally, was an incredibly difficult decision. This was a fantastic, heart-wrenching retelling of what Stephanie had to go through and still battles against.
As someone who also grew up in an evangelical household and has left that religion, this one really hit home. I cannot express how much it is worth the read. It will be immediately purchased upon release for my best friend.
#ThxNetGalley #StephanieStalvey #EverythinginColor
August 15, 2025
The thing about the purity culture is that it is usually used on the girls. They must remain pure until marriage. The boys, well, in theory they are told the same, but wink wink, nudge nudge.
Stephanie calls herself a church kid. She is reaised to think the church is always right, and that she has to please god, above all things. And she remains pure as the driven snow, to the point that she breaks out in a rash if she even thinks about going to far.
And then she meets the young man that she falls in love with, and she has problems, because she isn’t supposed to lust, and yet she is.
I love the self-reflect on this book, as the author talks about her upbringing, and how she feels now that she is married and has a child. On one hand, she wants to bring the child to church, and have that community, but on the other hand, she hates the hypocriticalness of it all, and the shame put on young children for being themselves.
It is amazing that she grew up and was able to reflect enough and break free enough to see the two sides of the religion she grew up in.
Good look at how religion can strangle one, as it tries to embrace at the same time. Well written story. My heart aches for her as she struggled with her love of her boyfriend, and knowing she wasn't supposed to go even as far as kissing with him.
Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book is coming out on the 28th of April 2026.
Stephanie calls herself a church kid. She is reaised to think the church is always right, and that she has to please god, above all things. And she remains pure as the driven snow, to the point that she breaks out in a rash if she even thinks about going to far.
And then she meets the young man that she falls in love with, and she has problems, because she isn’t supposed to lust, and yet she is.
I love the self-reflect on this book, as the author talks about her upbringing, and how she feels now that she is married and has a child. On one hand, she wants to bring the child to church, and have that community, but on the other hand, she hates the hypocriticalness of it all, and the shame put on young children for being themselves.
It is amazing that she grew up and was able to reflect enough and break free enough to see the two sides of the religion she grew up in.
Good look at how religion can strangle one, as it tries to embrace at the same time. Well written story. My heart aches for her as she struggled with her love of her boyfriend, and knowing she wasn't supposed to go even as far as kissing with him.
Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book is coming out on the 28th of April 2026.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
thank you Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review
This book is a very complex one for me to write a review on... And that's because of my own personal life being wrapped. So tightly into this same narrative.
Indeed, so many of the illustrations that featured moments of growing up in the church. Indeed I felt like i was reliving my past. Donut Man, asking Jesus into my heart numerous times because you didn't know if it worked the first time, purity culture.......it's all elements that have impacted my own Faith journey and where I am today.
That's where my struggle is. But this book I was struggling to reconcile my own" deconstruction" or rather my disentangling.. I'm wondering where the author truly stood. I struggled with that. Have they walked away from God entirely? Have they embraced more of a secular mindset? Where are they exactly? I do hate how the church has hurt so many people and how it has influenced so many lives.
What stinks is how human men have taken scripture and twisted it for their own ends. That is where so many of these problems lie. I know this book will resonate with many, especially those who have walked away from Christ in the church. For those of us who have remained, such as myself...it's not so easy of an answer
This book is a very complex one for me to write a review on... And that's because of my own personal life being wrapped. So tightly into this same narrative.
Indeed, so many of the illustrations that featured moments of growing up in the church. Indeed I felt like i was reliving my past. Donut Man, asking Jesus into my heart numerous times because you didn't know if it worked the first time, purity culture.......it's all elements that have impacted my own Faith journey and where I am today.
That's where my struggle is. But this book I was struggling to reconcile my own" deconstruction" or rather my disentangling.. I'm wondering where the author truly stood. I struggled with that. Have they walked away from God entirely? Have they embraced more of a secular mindset? Where are they exactly? I do hate how the church has hurt so many people and how it has influenced so many lives.
What stinks is how human men have taken scripture and twisted it for their own ends. That is where so many of these problems lie. I know this book will resonate with many, especially those who have walked away from Christ in the church. For those of us who have remained, such as myself...it's not so easy of an answer
June 4, 2026
As a recovering Evangelical, Stephanie’s story resonated with me deeply. I was that same church kid, seeing the hypocrisy of what the so called “leaders” of my church did in the name of faith verses what Jesus actually said, and was met with the same anger and contempt from my so called “brothers and sisters in Christ” when I dared to ask questions. I especially loved her sections on motherhood. As a new mom myself I see the Divine in my children every day. What a gift to experience love like this. Thank you Stephanie for putting pen and paint to paper. Well done.
November 7, 2025
Stephanie Stalvey’s Everything in Color: A Love Story is an incredibly brave and vulnerable sort of graphic memoir. It’s the sort of story that sends me sort of reeling through a ton of different and one that only further builds upon a frustration I have with the world, particularly that of the manipulation for control filled variety. The author’s journey with what I consider to be some of the most widespread forms of genuine—and perhaps unintentional—abuses that exist within the world’s religions.
I certainly appreciate Stalvey’s raw expression of her experiences, the difficulties that they have placed on her life, particularly in how she has viewed herself throughout her childhood and young adult life. It’s truly amazing to watch the resilience a person can have and how they use that to build a more positive life not only for themselves, but for everyone around them.
Stalvey’s artwork is beautiful, though I would advise to read this book outside of work since a few of the pages are a little more private in nature—primarily centered around the experiences of motherhood. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to read about her experiences and I hope her journey was cathartic for her.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I certainly appreciate Stalvey’s raw expression of her experiences, the difficulties that they have placed on her life, particularly in how she has viewed herself throughout her childhood and young adult life. It’s truly amazing to watch the resilience a person can have and how they use that to build a more positive life not only for themselves, but for everyone around them.
Stalvey’s artwork is beautiful, though I would advise to read this book outside of work since a few of the pages are a little more private in nature—primarily centered around the experiences of motherhood. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to read about her experiences and I hope her journey was cathartic for her.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
May 1, 2026
A highly anticipated read that, if I'm being honest, was always going to earn 5 stars for the gorgeous art alone! So many beautiful pages, and how humbling knowing they were drawn and painted by hand. But beyond that, Stalvey accomplishes something truly impressive: her memoir about the pain of high-control religion and the healing of finding safety in her own body and relationships navigates the anger and the grief of this experience without bitterness. I think so many reckoning with black and white thinking or purity culture fall into similar patterns at opposite extremes, applying the same rigidity and judgement they are trying to escape to those who oppose their new perspectives. Stalvey has managed so much gentleness for her former self and beliefs, which may not be what everyone needs but is so refreshing for those of us who still feel tenderness around our early religious experiences. Because of this, she's able to show that despite the ways she has changed, she hasn't had to sever herself: by staying tender towards her own pain in the past, she has found a continuity and integration that I truly admire.
Stalvey conveys much of this integration by juxtaposing more recent scenes against flashbacks, highlighting how the hard-earned freedom she's found as an adult and especially a parent now informs her recollections of her distressed youth. I did find myself wondering about the time and the work in between; although I think seeing how far she's come is a source of hope I also think that aching space in between can be lonely and so would have liked to see a little more of her navigating that. As it is though, the book is around 500 pages and shares some very raw personal moments so I can't really be disappointed!
While the trust and affection that grows between Stephanie and James over the course of the memoir is so special and beautiful, I personally interpret the subtitle "a love story" as a reference to Stephanie's journey to loving herself: part of what makes James so good for her is his ability to provide patient support as she unravels her inner shame and fear to discover her own belovedness.
I related to so much of this book and was comforted and inspired by the places it goes a bit beyond my progress. Highly recommend to those who struggle personally with the aftermath of purity culture, or for those who want to better understand a loved one in that struggle.
Stalvey conveys much of this integration by juxtaposing more recent scenes against flashbacks, highlighting how the hard-earned freedom she's found as an adult and especially a parent now informs her recollections of her distressed youth. I did find myself wondering about the time and the work in between; although I think seeing how far she's come is a source of hope I also think that aching space in between can be lonely and so would have liked to see a little more of her navigating that. As it is though, the book is around 500 pages and shares some very raw personal moments so I can't really be disappointed!
While the trust and affection that grows between Stephanie and James over the course of the memoir is so special and beautiful, I personally interpret the subtitle "a love story" as a reference to Stephanie's journey to loving herself: part of what makes James so good for her is his ability to provide patient support as she unravels her inner shame and fear to discover her own belovedness.
I related to so much of this book and was comforted and inspired by the places it goes a bit beyond my progress. Highly recommend to those who struggle personally with the aftermath of purity culture, or for those who want to better understand a loved one in that struggle.
May 6, 2026
I'm not a big graphic novel person, but this book was everything I was hoping it would be — and more. The artwork was gorgeous, and Stephanie's story was so captivating and poignant. A really fresh and vulnerable take on the faith deconstruction memoir, and one I found deeply relatable. Will definitely be returning to it often.
May 2, 2026
First book I’ve ever pre ordered as far as I remember. I saw her comics online and they shocked me with how closely they spoke to my life and thoughts. In the journey of deconstruction I know there are others, but it’s so cool to let their voices be louder than the criticism for a bit.
I cried so many separate times, starting like 50 pages in (James Dobson got me). I also had to put the book down several times because of some of the depressingly and infuriatingly real anecdotes. Some people really do live and talk like that youth pastor. The Bible studies, the shame, the conditions on your questions. Nothing you do is enough, and when people look back they rewrite your life as rebellion. There’s a lot of pain wrapped up in this book, but I also knew there’d be joy, and I felt encouraged to keep reading. It can be so hard to find joy not tainted by an oppressive embodied guilt and dread. Stephanie has the courage to let herself breathe in a new perspective. God is here with her, and doesn’t it sound crazy that she ever thought otherwise?
Anyway, love and recommend this book with the caveat that some people would totally hate it lol.
I cried so many separate times, starting like 50 pages in (James Dobson got me). I also had to put the book down several times because of some of the depressingly and infuriatingly real anecdotes. Some people really do live and talk like that youth pastor. The Bible studies, the shame, the conditions on your questions. Nothing you do is enough, and when people look back they rewrite your life as rebellion. There’s a lot of pain wrapped up in this book, but I also knew there’d be joy, and I felt encouraged to keep reading. It can be so hard to find joy not tainted by an oppressive embodied guilt and dread. Stephanie has the courage to let herself breathe in a new perspective. God is here with her, and doesn’t it sound crazy that she ever thought otherwise?
Anyway, love and recommend this book with the caveat that some people would totally hate it lol.
May 2, 2026
If you grew up in purity culture, prime 90s evangelical Christianity, and ended up outgrowing that mold… this may just be the most relatable, soul-healing, beautiful read of your life.
May 17, 2026
This was such a lovely read. It perfectly encompassed the experience of a woman (myself definitely included) growing up as Christians and how they make you feel about yourself, your body, and what is demanded of you in order to be a "Godly," "holy" and "good advocate" of the faith (puke). This book tells of the coming of age story of the author as she shows how her body still stores the harmful rhetoric of evangelical church teachings and how it impacted all of her social interactions and relationships with others. It shows how these messages become internalized on our conscious and ingrained as part of our childhood and how it can bubble up in adulthood (creepy).
It wasn't a total bashing of believers -Stephanie explains how her faith switched from obedience to a rigid code...to something so simple...love. She saw the disconnect between her faith leaders and the message that was coming through the Bible. Faith leaders tend to speak for God and claim they know EXACTLY who is going to hell and what causes you to go there. Not to mention they KNOW these are the end times so you must stay faithful and repentant (ugh, FOCUS Missionaries. Please never talk to me again.) But as Stephanie steps away from the church leaders and concentrates on her family and the love they have for each other, that is where she believes Heaven is - Here on this earth in the love you share with others.
It wasn't a total bashing of believers -Stephanie explains how her faith switched from obedience to a rigid code...to something so simple...love. She saw the disconnect between her faith leaders and the message that was coming through the Bible. Faith leaders tend to speak for God and claim they know EXACTLY who is going to hell and what causes you to go there. Not to mention they KNOW these are the end times so you must stay faithful and repentant (ugh, FOCUS Missionaries. Please never talk to me again.) But as Stephanie steps away from the church leaders and concentrates on her family and the love they have for each other, that is where she believes Heaven is - Here on this earth in the love you share with others.
May 3, 2026
I have enjoyed Stephanie Stalvey’s art online for quite some time, and was so excited for this book, I pre-ordered it twice! I’m glad I did, because I definitely want to keep one copy, and I am delighted to have a copy I can lend out.
This is such a beautiful story that both broke my heart and helped stitch it back together. The art is absolutely gorgeous and evocative, vibrant, and relatable. The text is incredible. I grew up pagan, so I did not grow up with this idea that sensuality was inherently sinful, and I feel like this book really helped me understand just how devastating that is, not only for a child but for an adult.
I feel like reading this book helped me understand why evangelicals are so fixated on the things they’re fixated on, and how much of it is not based in logic, but in fear, which is a lot harder to untangle. It does not pull punches about the accountability the church has for that kind of emotional abuse to create an environment of control, but I feel like it’s also very compassionate to people who are growing up in that environment. I didn’t really fully understand it before, and I feel like I understand it a lot better now.
But it’s not just a story of interrogating the authors relationship to faith, though that is very much intertwined in the other themes. It’s also about the author getting in touch with herself, and falling in love with someone who was wrestling with some of the same questions, though from a different perspective. I think that’s really helpful for many people, and I hope that this book gets a very wide reach. I think it will be eye-opening for a lot of people, whether you are currently in a high control religion and beginning to ask questions but wrestling with guilt for doing so, or you have fully deconstructed, or like me, this entire mindset is a little bit alien to you. It’s really powerful and I’m so glad that I got to experience it.
This is such a beautiful story that both broke my heart and helped stitch it back together. The art is absolutely gorgeous and evocative, vibrant, and relatable. The text is incredible. I grew up pagan, so I did not grow up with this idea that sensuality was inherently sinful, and I feel like this book really helped me understand just how devastating that is, not only for a child but for an adult.
I feel like reading this book helped me understand why evangelicals are so fixated on the things they’re fixated on, and how much of it is not based in logic, but in fear, which is a lot harder to untangle. It does not pull punches about the accountability the church has for that kind of emotional abuse to create an environment of control, but I feel like it’s also very compassionate to people who are growing up in that environment. I didn’t really fully understand it before, and I feel like I understand it a lot better now.
But it’s not just a story of interrogating the authors relationship to faith, though that is very much intertwined in the other themes. It’s also about the author getting in touch with herself, and falling in love with someone who was wrestling with some of the same questions, though from a different perspective. I think that’s really helpful for many people, and I hope that this book gets a very wide reach. I think it will be eye-opening for a lot of people, whether you are currently in a high control religion and beginning to ask questions but wrestling with guilt for doing so, or you have fully deconstructed, or like me, this entire mindset is a little bit alien to you. It’s really powerful and I’m so glad that I got to experience it.
June 7, 2026
This was like balm on an old wound that has already helped me to recover from things I experienced from my own upbringing. This story was exactly identical to dogma I was raised with, dogma that shaped my life and dictated who I was until I broke free of it to shape my own identity. But breaking free didn’t mean I wasn’t left without the wounds of tearing out a tumor that grew on my spirit. My scars still bleed with used up guilt and fear that used to rule my every action when I least expect it. It lives with me, but after reading this, I’ve seen that it doesn’t have to control me.
This was a blessing to read, something that gave me hope even though it opened me raw and described things I had come to realize but couldn’t put into words. It was a relief to see another had made a similar journey through and realized the contradictions and dangers that I recognized from within as well.
While I may never be comfortable with religion again after what I experienced, this read has already helped me not fear myself and who I have become.
This was a blessing to read, something that gave me hope even though it opened me raw and described things I had come to realize but couldn’t put into words. It was a relief to see another had made a similar journey through and realized the contradictions and dangers that I recognized from within as well.
While I may never be comfortable with religion again after what I experienced, this read has already helped me not fear myself and who I have become.
June 23, 2026
Stalvey's gorgeous graphic memoir about her strict Christian upbringing, her courtship and marriage to her husband, James, and raising her little boy, is big but beautiful. She struggles with a question many Christians--myself included as a Catholic Hispanic woman--deal with: falling in love and expressing that love with that little (sometimes loud) voice in your head telling you to save the full expression of that love for marriage. I loved the enlightening and deep discussions with her boyfriend as they navigated their relationship, contending with others' opinions and judgments, while coming to the gradual realization that God brought them together. Rendered in both black and white and full, luminous color, this is a delight.
June 17, 2026
I feel like anything I say about this beautiful graphic memoir will be biased, because I felt so seen by her and all that she felt and wrestled with. I'm inspired and encouraged by the ways she's taken what she was handed by evangelicalism and turned it into motivation to love and live more genuinely, in ways she used to believe she couldn't.
On top of that, she's such a talented artist; I love that she embraces the black and white versus color concept and uses it to further tell her story through illustration. If you grew up in the church or under organized religion and took it to heart so deeply that it nearly ruined you, read this. She'll meet you there.
On top of that, she's such a talented artist; I love that she embraces the black and white versus color concept and uses it to further tell her story through illustration. If you grew up in the church or under organized religion and took it to heart so deeply that it nearly ruined you, read this. She'll meet you there.
May 25, 2026
Thank you to Netgalley, FirstSecond Books and 23rd St.
Love me a long graphic novel, especially when it hits a bit close to home. Having grown up in a somewhat religious family, purity wasn't exactly forced but it was definitely implied. Read this in one sitting, and enjoyed it as it made me unpack some points in my life as well. To know that it was practically an autobiography of the author and her little family, makes it even more emotional.
Enjoyed the read, and loved the authors note at the end. The side by side photos with the artwork was perfect!
Love me a long graphic novel, especially when it hits a bit close to home. Having grown up in a somewhat religious family, purity wasn't exactly forced but it was definitely implied. Read this in one sitting, and enjoyed it as it made me unpack some points in my life as well. To know that it was practically an autobiography of the author and her little family, makes it even more emotional.
Enjoyed the read, and loved the authors note at the end. The side by side photos with the artwork was perfect!
June 20, 2026
This book is one of the most beautiful, healing things I have ever read. I felt so much of myself and my journey through deconstruction reflected on these gorgeous pages - faith, afterlife, love, my relationship with my body and sexuality, healing through shame, and more. It reminds me that faith is most vibrantly expressed in community, and that together we can broaden how we conceptualize the divine. Thank you, Stephanie, for this incredible book. With much love from a reconstructing seminarian 💚
June 4, 2026
Wow. Just, wow. The artwork alone is stunning. The story, the self-reflection it caused, and the tears was unexpected. I hope there is another book coming, but for now I will live in her Instagram feed.
I am going to mentally log this one with 'Dancing at the Pity Party'. Different topics, but each comforting in their own way.
I am going to mentally log this one with 'Dancing at the Pity Party'. Different topics, but each comforting in their own way.
June 18, 2026
Beautifully written and illustrated. So much of my own experience reflected back to me.
“ Now that I’m an adult I want to figure out how to hold it all in tension: to carry on the gifts given to me by the people who loved me into being while also addressing the formative wounds I have inherited which are now my responsibility to tend to for my own sake, as well as the sake of my child”
“ how sacred and strange to be alive at all, to love this much, to hurt this badly, to be a part of it all, and possibly awake to all the wonder and terror intertwined with our haunted ancient world to have our turn in the unending circle, even if just for a moment for all of it to exist in us”
“ Now that I’m an adult I want to figure out how to hold it all in tension: to carry on the gifts given to me by the people who loved me into being while also addressing the formative wounds I have inherited which are now my responsibility to tend to for my own sake, as well as the sake of my child”
“ how sacred and strange to be alive at all, to love this much, to hurt this badly, to be a part of it all, and possibly awake to all the wonder and terror intertwined with our haunted ancient world to have our turn in the unending circle, even if just for a moment for all of it to exist in us”
April 19, 2026
Everything isn’t always black and white and the Fitbit depicted it perfectly. The story flowed beautifully and the illustrations were all stunning throughout. I loved the back and forth timelines, it helped piece everything together flawlessly.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!
May 20, 2026
I’ve been a fan of Stephanie’s work for a few years after stumbling upon her instagram posts. As a woman with purity culture and youth group trauma, I found her art and words have resonated with me deeply. Stephanie’s graphic memoir truly is a source of solace for my spiritual journey.
June 3, 2026
As someone who personally suffers from scrupulosity, Stephanie’s story is a breath of fresh air. I’m so thankful to be able to hold this book now and for her starting all of this! She’s done amazing, and I can’t wait to for more of her stories to come!
June 3, 2026
so so so so so beautiful ☹️❤️ religious, even
December 1, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley and 23rd Street for providing an ARC of this title. All opinions are my own.
An absolutely marvelous graphic novel debut--although I feel that I'm cheating a little by calling it that, because I've been following Stephanie Stalvey on Instagram for some time! Her artwork is stunning, emotional, and evocative, but what drew me to her in the first place was her rising spot in the ranks of the IG exvangelicals--people raised in high-control, punitive forms of Christianity who now share with the world their vision of a God removed from the dogma espoused by his power-hungry followers. Stalvey's own journey--from a child of deeply felt faith, to a young adult beginning to question her church's misogyny, purity culture, power and control, to a college student meeting the gentle seminarian who would eventually become her husband--is beautiful and heartbreaking, as marriage and motherhood force her to confront that what she knows of love is incompatible with the harshness religion she grew up in. Highly, highly recommend to anyone interested in deconstruction, personal memoir, and graphic nonfiction.
An absolutely marvelous graphic novel debut--although I feel that I'm cheating a little by calling it that, because I've been following Stephanie Stalvey on Instagram for some time! Her artwork is stunning, emotional, and evocative, but what drew me to her in the first place was her rising spot in the ranks of the IG exvangelicals--people raised in high-control, punitive forms of Christianity who now share with the world their vision of a God removed from the dogma espoused by his power-hungry followers. Stalvey's own journey--from a child of deeply felt faith, to a young adult beginning to question her church's misogyny, purity culture, power and control, to a college student meeting the gentle seminarian who would eventually become her husband--is beautiful and heartbreaking, as marriage and motherhood force her to confront that what she knows of love is incompatible with the harshness religion she grew up in. Highly, highly recommend to anyone interested in deconstruction, personal memoir, and graphic nonfiction.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Who Gets to Name the Body
Reading “Everything in Color” as a memoir of faith, fear, desire, and the long struggle to reclaim the right to interpret a life
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 29th, 2026
In “Everything in Color,” evangelicalism is less a theology than a fight over who gets to authorize the body’s meaning. Stephanie Stalvey’s graphic memoir begins inside a world that wants naming rights over everything that counts: what a woman’s body means, what desire means, what goodness may lawfully resemble, what a child owes on entry, what love may call itself if it hopes to pass inspection. The book’s real quarrel is not whether Stephanie leaves that world. Memoir has already worn the carpet thin there. The quarrel is that she slowly wrests back the right to read her own life. First through art. Then through erotic trust. Then through motherhood. And finally through the bruising discovery that the body may know certain truths before theology agrees to hear them.
That gives “Everything in Color” more bite than its subtitle behaves. This is not merely a memoir of church childhood, or purity culture, or first serious love, though it is all three. It is a memoir about reclaiming the right to set the terms. Stalvey grows up in evangelical Christianity where black and white are not colors but a moral ledger book: pure or impure, saved or lost, flesh or spirit, heaven or hell. Chapel lessons tell children that they deserve eternal punishment and should count themselves lucky someone else took the punishment for them. Corporal discipline is hallowed as virtue. Puberty arrives as if the body has turned state’s witness. Beauty becomes risk. The body becomes both accused party and snitch.
Stalvey is too fair-minded, and too self-aware, to make that world cheap. One of the book’s shrewder moves is to grant warmth where warmth existed: music in the house, tenderness in the family, the upholstered comforts of church life, the real density of communal belonging. Without that, the critique would come much too easily. She takes the harder route. A sincere world can still be a warping one. Love can arrive so tightly stitched to fear that disentangling them later feels less like liberation than like setting a bone.
In outline, the plot behaves itself. The real disorder is elsewhere. A girl raised in evangelical certainty becomes an artist with an appetite for disobedient seeing and a body she has been trained to mistrust. She falls in love with James, a shy seminarian whose faith is gentler and less punitive than the institutions around him. Their relationship develops under the fluorescent supervision of Bible studies, modesty talk, “appearance of evil” anxieties, and the amateur vice squad of Christian peer culture. Then motherhood breaks the book open. Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, postpartum anxiety, miscarriage, and the simple unbearable fact of loving a child do what no debate can do: they make punitive theology feel not merely wrong but indecent. The story widens from private shame to institutional control, then turns toward a harder project: rebuilding the sacred around care, grief, bodily life, and relation.
But plot is not what keeps this memoir alive. What does is the way one experience keeps prying another open. Motherhood rereads childhood. Desire rereads doctrine. Grief rereads purity. The present keeps reaching back and changing the light on the past. That is the motor under the floorboards.
The book is strongest where it understands belief as body memory. Plenty of memoirs about religion can quote doctrine or narrate crisis. Stalvey is far more exact about what doctrine becomes once it leaves the sermon and enters the bloodstream. It blushes. It nauseates. It produces panic during intimacy, vigilance during motherhood, nightmares of falling forever in the dark. By the time Stephanie has stopped believing certain things, her body has not. Years after disbelief begins, it still behaves as if hell were weather and disobedience a physical hazard. The thing “Everything in Color” most stubbornly studies may be the body as a storehouse for old fear. Stalvey is not only saying, I no longer believe this. She is showing what it feels like when the nerves keep the faith after the mind has walked out.
That pressure gives the prose its charge. Stalvey writes in a mode equal parts scene, reflection, and spiritual self-annotation. Her sentences are measured, immediately readable, and only occasionally too fluent for their own good. Even when the prose loosens, it does not go soft-focus. She prefers a rhythm of memory, sensation, interpretation: a remembered incident, a bodily aftershock in the present, then a sentence that names the logic binding them. The language stays skin-close without turning confessional-mushy, analytical without putting on the chalk-dust authority of the classroom. Better still, it builds a carnal lexicon for the book’s larger claims: roots, blood, milk, water, womb, bloom, skin, breath. Those images do work the prose would otherwise have to spell out too bluntly. “Color,” especially, becomes more than a title metaphor. It becomes the book’s answer to moral flattening. Color arrives when life refuses to stay filed.
The drawings do the work the prose, left alone, might be tempted to explain twice. “Everything in Color” is not illustrated testimony. It is a graphic memoir that knows exactly why it needs to be graphic. The bleached-down memory pages hold regulation in visual form: church classrooms, playground borders, disciplinary interiors, all the small bureaucracies of obedience. The richer pages – coral, blue, deep green, warm flesh, heat-blooming hues – belong increasingly to maternity, desire, panic, reverie, and recovered sacredness. This is not prettiness with critical credentials pinned on. Black and white is the world as authority would like it: sorted, bordered, ruled. Color arrives when experience outruns doctrine.
The braid is what keeps that visual intelligence from becoming merely decorative. This is not a straight chronology of injury and release. It is recursive in a way that earns its room. A toddler tantrum sits beside memories of corporal punishment. Postpartum tenderness sits beside purity-culture shame. The adult mother telling her son he is still good when he makes mistakes becomes one of the book’s fiercest rebuttals to a theology of total depravity. Chapter titles such as “The Garden,” “The Mother,” “The Flesh and the Spirit,” “The Tree,” and “Home” do more than divide sections. They announce that the memoir is organized as a passage through symbolic states, not just a run of events. The braid does not warehouse material. It puts grain back into it.
There the ambition finally starts earning its keep. Stalvey does not merely indict evangelicalism. She builds a counter-reading. The proposition with real teeth is not rebellion for the dopamine hit, nor a misty sermon about “self-trust,” but a transfer of moral authority from doctrine to relation. Motherhood is where the book stops pretending abstraction can pay the bill. Looking at her son, Stalvey can no longer sustain the logic that children are born bad, that punishment is the deepest form of justice, that love becomes credible only when braided with threat. When she thinks, “Maybe God is a mother,” the line lands because the memoir has already made it expensive – paid for in blood, milk, sleep deprivation, intrusive thoughts, and the fear-struck softness of keeping another life alive. Beside Tommy, original sin does not merely look mistaken. It looks obscene.
That is also why the book’s politics matter without ever becoming a smug accessory. “Everything in Color” speaks directly to the afterlife of purity culture, to church systems that call domination care, to the long habit of treating women’s bodies as supervised property, and to the crooked machinery that passes itself off as moral order. Its politics are plain on sight, and, for me, that is a feature rather than a defect. More important, they are earned in the grain of the writing. The book never starts sounding like it wants to moderate a panel on itself. Its relevance grows from scene rather than being pasted on afterward.
James is more than the memoir’s ethical foil, though the book wisely understands how easily he could have become one. He would be intolerable if he existed only to prove that a gentler Christian masculinity is possible. Instead he is a person shaped by loneliness, reserve, seriousness, and caution, but not wholly colonized by the punitive reflexes around him. Their relationship works because it never becomes pure fantasy. He is almost implausibly gentle, ethically careful without turning antiseptic, and funny in ways the book is smart enough not to overplay. The snowed-in chapter – the storm-locked chamber scene where intimacy becomes possible because they are trapped together and Stephanie finally asks for what she wants – is the book’s boldest test case. It works because it has been built from panic, embarrassment, slowness, consent, laughter, and relief. The revelation asks more than whether sex can be pleasurable. It asks whether erotic tenderness may tell the truth about holiness more accurately than purity culture ever did. That is a dangerous claim for a memoir like this to make. Stalvey comes impressively close to earning it.
The book’s deepest strength may be one that will likely be underpraised: it does not use motherhood as a softening device. It uses motherhood as a method of thought. Too many memoirs treat children as emotional proof of seriousness, or as a sentimental light source switched on for the last act. Stalvey makes motherhood intellectually invasive. It changes the terms of every earlier question. What kind of theology can survive looking at a child and calling him depraved? What kind of love keeps punishment at its center and still expects to be called love? What kind of God becomes more believable after birth, sleeplessness, milk, panic, tenderness, and grief? By making maternal life a site of argument rather than ornament, the memoir becomes larger and stranger than its setup first suggests.
Still, lucidity comes with a cost. “Everything in Color” sometimes reaches the conclusion a beat before the scene has fully arrived there. The late reflections on Eros, integration, and recovered sacredness are often moving, but now and then they feel a shade over-finished. Graham, the institutional bully in human form, is effective but almost too cleanly symbolic – doctrine in a human suit, temper included. Memoir is under no obligation to mystify every antagonist, and I would not ask it to. But there are moments when the book’s retrospective intelligence smooths what might have been more volatile or strange. The strongest pages trust image, sequence, and bodily sensation to carry the argument. The weaker ones spell it out after the point has already landed.
That limitation matters because the memoir’s best scenes are so good. A caged animal pacing in the zoo. A child asking what happens when we die. A body flushing red in the middle of intimacy. The awful inherited reflex by which love and punishment still try to call each other by the same name. In those moments Stalvey does not need to explain much. The work is already done. The page has told the truth before the essayistic mind arrives to annotate it.
If you need coordinates, Craig Thompson’s “Blankets” and Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” offer useful bearings, though Stalvey is more bodily than the former and less formally severe than the latter. If Linda Kay Klein’s “Pure” is another nearby companion, Stalvey’s distinction is to show purity culture where it finally lives: in pulse, stomach, skin, dream, and bed.
For me, the book settles at 87/100, which translates to 4 stars on Goodreads: not because its ambitions are modest, but because they are large enough to leave visible seams. Even so, the seams belong to something alive. What continues to ring afterward is not one argument but a relay of revisions: the child who thinks God might be arboreal, the young woman treating her own body like contraband, the mother discovering that love can make old theologies look morally ludicrous, the adult refusing to parcel up hell for her son as inheritance. By the last pages, “color” no longer means uplift. It means the harder discipline of looking required to hold more than one thing at once – desire and reverence, grief and gladness, flesh and what keeps slipping the label, the child you were and the child now asking what happens when we die. Stalvey’s final turn is not that she escapes the old black-and-white world. It is that she stops mistaking its bars for load-bearing walls.
Reading “Everything in Color” as a memoir of faith, fear, desire, and the long struggle to reclaim the right to interpret a life
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 29th, 2026
In “Everything in Color,” evangelicalism is less a theology than a fight over who gets to authorize the body’s meaning. Stephanie Stalvey’s graphic memoir begins inside a world that wants naming rights over everything that counts: what a woman’s body means, what desire means, what goodness may lawfully resemble, what a child owes on entry, what love may call itself if it hopes to pass inspection. The book’s real quarrel is not whether Stephanie leaves that world. Memoir has already worn the carpet thin there. The quarrel is that she slowly wrests back the right to read her own life. First through art. Then through erotic trust. Then through motherhood. And finally through the bruising discovery that the body may know certain truths before theology agrees to hear them.
That gives “Everything in Color” more bite than its subtitle behaves. This is not merely a memoir of church childhood, or purity culture, or first serious love, though it is all three. It is a memoir about reclaiming the right to set the terms. Stalvey grows up in evangelical Christianity where black and white are not colors but a moral ledger book: pure or impure, saved or lost, flesh or spirit, heaven or hell. Chapel lessons tell children that they deserve eternal punishment and should count themselves lucky someone else took the punishment for them. Corporal discipline is hallowed as virtue. Puberty arrives as if the body has turned state’s witness. Beauty becomes risk. The body becomes both accused party and snitch.
Stalvey is too fair-minded, and too self-aware, to make that world cheap. One of the book’s shrewder moves is to grant warmth where warmth existed: music in the house, tenderness in the family, the upholstered comforts of church life, the real density of communal belonging. Without that, the critique would come much too easily. She takes the harder route. A sincere world can still be a warping one. Love can arrive so tightly stitched to fear that disentangling them later feels less like liberation than like setting a bone.
In outline, the plot behaves itself. The real disorder is elsewhere. A girl raised in evangelical certainty becomes an artist with an appetite for disobedient seeing and a body she has been trained to mistrust. She falls in love with James, a shy seminarian whose faith is gentler and less punitive than the institutions around him. Their relationship develops under the fluorescent supervision of Bible studies, modesty talk, “appearance of evil” anxieties, and the amateur vice squad of Christian peer culture. Then motherhood breaks the book open. Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, postpartum anxiety, miscarriage, and the simple unbearable fact of loving a child do what no debate can do: they make punitive theology feel not merely wrong but indecent. The story widens from private shame to institutional control, then turns toward a harder project: rebuilding the sacred around care, grief, bodily life, and relation.
But plot is not what keeps this memoir alive. What does is the way one experience keeps prying another open. Motherhood rereads childhood. Desire rereads doctrine. Grief rereads purity. The present keeps reaching back and changing the light on the past. That is the motor under the floorboards.
The book is strongest where it understands belief as body memory. Plenty of memoirs about religion can quote doctrine or narrate crisis. Stalvey is far more exact about what doctrine becomes once it leaves the sermon and enters the bloodstream. It blushes. It nauseates. It produces panic during intimacy, vigilance during motherhood, nightmares of falling forever in the dark. By the time Stephanie has stopped believing certain things, her body has not. Years after disbelief begins, it still behaves as if hell were weather and disobedience a physical hazard. The thing “Everything in Color” most stubbornly studies may be the body as a storehouse for old fear. Stalvey is not only saying, I no longer believe this. She is showing what it feels like when the nerves keep the faith after the mind has walked out.
That pressure gives the prose its charge. Stalvey writes in a mode equal parts scene, reflection, and spiritual self-annotation. Her sentences are measured, immediately readable, and only occasionally too fluent for their own good. Even when the prose loosens, it does not go soft-focus. She prefers a rhythm of memory, sensation, interpretation: a remembered incident, a bodily aftershock in the present, then a sentence that names the logic binding them. The language stays skin-close without turning confessional-mushy, analytical without putting on the chalk-dust authority of the classroom. Better still, it builds a carnal lexicon for the book’s larger claims: roots, blood, milk, water, womb, bloom, skin, breath. Those images do work the prose would otherwise have to spell out too bluntly. “Color,” especially, becomes more than a title metaphor. It becomes the book’s answer to moral flattening. Color arrives when life refuses to stay filed.
The drawings do the work the prose, left alone, might be tempted to explain twice. “Everything in Color” is not illustrated testimony. It is a graphic memoir that knows exactly why it needs to be graphic. The bleached-down memory pages hold regulation in visual form: church classrooms, playground borders, disciplinary interiors, all the small bureaucracies of obedience. The richer pages – coral, blue, deep green, warm flesh, heat-blooming hues – belong increasingly to maternity, desire, panic, reverie, and recovered sacredness. This is not prettiness with critical credentials pinned on. Black and white is the world as authority would like it: sorted, bordered, ruled. Color arrives when experience outruns doctrine.
The braid is what keeps that visual intelligence from becoming merely decorative. This is not a straight chronology of injury and release. It is recursive in a way that earns its room. A toddler tantrum sits beside memories of corporal punishment. Postpartum tenderness sits beside purity-culture shame. The adult mother telling her son he is still good when he makes mistakes becomes one of the book’s fiercest rebuttals to a theology of total depravity. Chapter titles such as “The Garden,” “The Mother,” “The Flesh and the Spirit,” “The Tree,” and “Home” do more than divide sections. They announce that the memoir is organized as a passage through symbolic states, not just a run of events. The braid does not warehouse material. It puts grain back into it.
There the ambition finally starts earning its keep. Stalvey does not merely indict evangelicalism. She builds a counter-reading. The proposition with real teeth is not rebellion for the dopamine hit, nor a misty sermon about “self-trust,” but a transfer of moral authority from doctrine to relation. Motherhood is where the book stops pretending abstraction can pay the bill. Looking at her son, Stalvey can no longer sustain the logic that children are born bad, that punishment is the deepest form of justice, that love becomes credible only when braided with threat. When she thinks, “Maybe God is a mother,” the line lands because the memoir has already made it expensive – paid for in blood, milk, sleep deprivation, intrusive thoughts, and the fear-struck softness of keeping another life alive. Beside Tommy, original sin does not merely look mistaken. It looks obscene.
That is also why the book’s politics matter without ever becoming a smug accessory. “Everything in Color” speaks directly to the afterlife of purity culture, to church systems that call domination care, to the long habit of treating women’s bodies as supervised property, and to the crooked machinery that passes itself off as moral order. Its politics are plain on sight, and, for me, that is a feature rather than a defect. More important, they are earned in the grain of the writing. The book never starts sounding like it wants to moderate a panel on itself. Its relevance grows from scene rather than being pasted on afterward.
James is more than the memoir’s ethical foil, though the book wisely understands how easily he could have become one. He would be intolerable if he existed only to prove that a gentler Christian masculinity is possible. Instead he is a person shaped by loneliness, reserve, seriousness, and caution, but not wholly colonized by the punitive reflexes around him. Their relationship works because it never becomes pure fantasy. He is almost implausibly gentle, ethically careful without turning antiseptic, and funny in ways the book is smart enough not to overplay. The snowed-in chapter – the storm-locked chamber scene where intimacy becomes possible because they are trapped together and Stephanie finally asks for what she wants – is the book’s boldest test case. It works because it has been built from panic, embarrassment, slowness, consent, laughter, and relief. The revelation asks more than whether sex can be pleasurable. It asks whether erotic tenderness may tell the truth about holiness more accurately than purity culture ever did. That is a dangerous claim for a memoir like this to make. Stalvey comes impressively close to earning it.
The book’s deepest strength may be one that will likely be underpraised: it does not use motherhood as a softening device. It uses motherhood as a method of thought. Too many memoirs treat children as emotional proof of seriousness, or as a sentimental light source switched on for the last act. Stalvey makes motherhood intellectually invasive. It changes the terms of every earlier question. What kind of theology can survive looking at a child and calling him depraved? What kind of love keeps punishment at its center and still expects to be called love? What kind of God becomes more believable after birth, sleeplessness, milk, panic, tenderness, and grief? By making maternal life a site of argument rather than ornament, the memoir becomes larger and stranger than its setup first suggests.
Still, lucidity comes with a cost. “Everything in Color” sometimes reaches the conclusion a beat before the scene has fully arrived there. The late reflections on Eros, integration, and recovered sacredness are often moving, but now and then they feel a shade over-finished. Graham, the institutional bully in human form, is effective but almost too cleanly symbolic – doctrine in a human suit, temper included. Memoir is under no obligation to mystify every antagonist, and I would not ask it to. But there are moments when the book’s retrospective intelligence smooths what might have been more volatile or strange. The strongest pages trust image, sequence, and bodily sensation to carry the argument. The weaker ones spell it out after the point has already landed.
That limitation matters because the memoir’s best scenes are so good. A caged animal pacing in the zoo. A child asking what happens when we die. A body flushing red in the middle of intimacy. The awful inherited reflex by which love and punishment still try to call each other by the same name. In those moments Stalvey does not need to explain much. The work is already done. The page has told the truth before the essayistic mind arrives to annotate it.
If you need coordinates, Craig Thompson’s “Blankets” and Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” offer useful bearings, though Stalvey is more bodily than the former and less formally severe than the latter. If Linda Kay Klein’s “Pure” is another nearby companion, Stalvey’s distinction is to show purity culture where it finally lives: in pulse, stomach, skin, dream, and bed.
For me, the book settles at 87/100, which translates to 4 stars on Goodreads: not because its ambitions are modest, but because they are large enough to leave visible seams. Even so, the seams belong to something alive. What continues to ring afterward is not one argument but a relay of revisions: the child who thinks God might be arboreal, the young woman treating her own body like contraband, the mother discovering that love can make old theologies look morally ludicrous, the adult refusing to parcel up hell for her son as inheritance. By the last pages, “color” no longer means uplift. It means the harder discipline of looking required to hold more than one thing at once – desire and reverence, grief and gladness, flesh and what keeps slipping the label, the child you were and the child now asking what happens when we die. Stalvey’s final turn is not that she escapes the old black-and-white world. It is that she stops mistaking its bars for load-bearing walls.
April 30, 2026
As someone who grew up in a similar enough background, this book is so important to me. I followed along as bits were posted on Instagram and I am so excited to have a physical copy!
May 1, 2026
This is one of my favorite books ever and it came out last week
May 27, 2026
One of those books that feels like reading about your own life on the page.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 140 reviews