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COWS
32 pages, ebook
Published July 1, 2025
2 people want to read
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July 4, 2025
Grief often hides in the silences.
It can be found tucked between hospital corridors. In late-night conversations. In shared childhood memories.
In everything that’s voiced there’s a hidden truth as Devi Menon tells us in her second graphic novel “Cows”. A brother and sister wait at a hospital where their grandmother is admitted. “It’s an 88% bleed of the brain. It’s bound to take time.” And time crawls by in the long wait. It’s not punctuated by frightening post-operative summaries or evident emotional churn with tears or breaking voices. Here, unsaid feelings are expressed through nostalgia and fragmented memories - the small, strange ways we try to stay afloat when life begins to unravel.
Between uncertainty and fatigue, and coffees grown cold, the siblings fall back on an old beloved childhood game of Cows and Bulls. It’s a distraction, a tether to familiarity. But beneath the wordplay and guesses run a deeper current of fear, and the desperate human urge to hold on to something.
Menon’s writing leans into subtlety. The story unfolds in fragments with half-formed thoughts, hesitant conversations, and the awkwardness of adults trying to comfort one another when no comfort feels adequate. The language mirrors the emotional landscape - gentle, restrained, with occasional moments of diamond sharp clarity that slice through the quiet like glass. Their demeanour is stoic, matter-of-fact, tinged with an acceptance of the situation at hand, as their thoughts wander from if “she’ll ever be the same” to tracing their grandmother’s life through key milestones to thinking out loud on all the should haves and could haves.
The rules of the game they play become vessels for everything they cannot articulate. Menon captures that tension with care. The disjointed structure of the story too reflects the experience of grief and waiting. At times, this approach feels intentionally unsettling. The narrative doesn’t offer neat progression or closure. It wanders, much like the mind does when faced with uncertainty.
For some, this might feel elusive. But for those willing to sit with its gentle discomfort, there’s a delicate, poetic meditation on family, vulnerability, and the language of fear to relish. And I certainly relished it. I accepted the invite to sit in the spaces between sentences, to notice what isn’t being said as much as what is.
The spare prose is ensconced in gorgeous illustrations. Menon splashes some of her panels with rich colours and juxtaposes others with greys and blacks. I thought this was a brilliant way of imitating life and also enhancing the mellow text, giving it a dynamism that only illustrations can.
“Cows” is not a conventional novel. It resists easy categorisation, floating somewhere between memoir and fiction. But in its understated way, it captures something achingly familiar: those soothing rituals we create to survive the unbearable.
Full disclosure: the author is my sister-in-law. However, this review reflects my honest and unbiased opinion of the work.
It can be found tucked between hospital corridors. In late-night conversations. In shared childhood memories.
In everything that’s voiced there’s a hidden truth as Devi Menon tells us in her second graphic novel “Cows”. A brother and sister wait at a hospital where their grandmother is admitted. “It’s an 88% bleed of the brain. It’s bound to take time.” And time crawls by in the long wait. It’s not punctuated by frightening post-operative summaries or evident emotional churn with tears or breaking voices. Here, unsaid feelings are expressed through nostalgia and fragmented memories - the small, strange ways we try to stay afloat when life begins to unravel.
Between uncertainty and fatigue, and coffees grown cold, the siblings fall back on an old beloved childhood game of Cows and Bulls. It’s a distraction, a tether to familiarity. But beneath the wordplay and guesses run a deeper current of fear, and the desperate human urge to hold on to something.
Menon’s writing leans into subtlety. The story unfolds in fragments with half-formed thoughts, hesitant conversations, and the awkwardness of adults trying to comfort one another when no comfort feels adequate. The language mirrors the emotional landscape - gentle, restrained, with occasional moments of diamond sharp clarity that slice through the quiet like glass. Their demeanour is stoic, matter-of-fact, tinged with an acceptance of the situation at hand, as their thoughts wander from if “she’ll ever be the same” to tracing their grandmother’s life through key milestones to thinking out loud on all the should haves and could haves.
The rules of the game they play become vessels for everything they cannot articulate. Menon captures that tension with care. The disjointed structure of the story too reflects the experience of grief and waiting. At times, this approach feels intentionally unsettling. The narrative doesn’t offer neat progression or closure. It wanders, much like the mind does when faced with uncertainty.
For some, this might feel elusive. But for those willing to sit with its gentle discomfort, there’s a delicate, poetic meditation on family, vulnerability, and the language of fear to relish. And I certainly relished it. I accepted the invite to sit in the spaces between sentences, to notice what isn’t being said as much as what is.
The spare prose is ensconced in gorgeous illustrations. Menon splashes some of her panels with rich colours and juxtaposes others with greys and blacks. I thought this was a brilliant way of imitating life and also enhancing the mellow text, giving it a dynamism that only illustrations can.
“Cows” is not a conventional novel. It resists easy categorisation, floating somewhere between memoir and fiction. But in its understated way, it captures something achingly familiar: those soothing rituals we create to survive the unbearable.
Full disclosure: the author is my sister-in-law. However, this review reflects my honest and unbiased opinion of the work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review