With­in the past decade a new cat­e­go­ry of book as made an appear­ance — the self-pub­lished graph­ic nov­el. A vari­ety of cri­te­ria may be involved: nar­ra­tive qual­i­ty, art, ac- cura­cy and the age of its cre­ator. <em>Keeping My Hope</em> is a graph­ic nov­el of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion and great empa­thy. The young author says that he start­ed out writ­ing <em>Keeping My Hope</em> just for him­self, to orga­nize and detail the knowl­edge that he had gained from his research and read­ing. He did a fine job. It begins with an elder­ly grand­fa­ther try­ing to tell his sto­ry to one of his younger grand­chil­dren, the old­er ones pos­si­bly hav­ing already heard it told by him. The old man revis­its his hap­py child­hood in Poland where sports drew chil­dren of both the Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian reli­gions togeth­er for a while, until the Nazi inva­sion. The sto­ry of the Holo­caust includ­ing the camps, the ter­ror and the cru­el­ty of their Ger­man guards is told with emo­tion. This young artist-author becomes, in a sense, the main char­ac­ter, Ari, a boy not much old­er than him­self. A dif­fer­ent reli­gion, a dif­fer­ent coun­try, but for the luck of the draw (no pun intend­ed), why not him­self? Why not, indeed? His iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the injus­tice and hor­ror of the sit­u­a­tion is so strong that the author can­not let it go. He relives it, iden­ti­fy­ing with one of the Jew­ish pris­on­ers who is about to be killed, but that per­son must be saved because the young author can­not allow this final sac­ri­fice. How could the author sur­ren­der the pos­si­bil­i­ty that his hero (a sur­ro­gate for him­self) might per­ish. Instead, he allows a mir­a­cle to hap­pen. An erst­while for­mer friend who is now a Ger­man sol­dier saves him at the last moment. That is what makes the dif­fer­ence between a child’s faith and an adult’s. One har­bors less cer­tain­ty that he will be saved. It is what we call ​“mag­i­cal think­ing” and that is what saves Ari. The illus­tra­tions of land­scape are quite good, while those of peo­ple are more ama­teur­ish but con­vey what is intend­ed. Con­grat­u­la­tions to the young artist/​author for his sin­cer­i­ty and per­se­ver­ance, to his fam­i­ly who encour­aged him and to the man who helped him find the details he need­ed regard­ing the Holo­caust and the camps.