Small in size but large in impact, this intimate memoir is a highly relevant and compassionate story of family, community,...
From the daughter of a French mother and Iraqi father comes a touching memoir of childhood in Iraq.
Writing with her husband, Findakly strings together memories and facts from her family’s past and present as well as from Iraqi culture, as if she is sharing herself with readers over tea. She begins with happy childhood moments in Iraq and her school days, her parents’ backgrounds and how they met, and introductions to other family members and neighbors. Especially poignant are the portrayals of her French mother’s successful adjustment to Iraqi society over 23 years and Findakly’s own process of growing apart from Iraqi society after her father decides they should move to France when she is a teenager. Trondheim’s charming cartoon drawings, colored by Findakly, help readers envision the worlds the family straddles, while occasional pages of family photographs remind readers of the author’s historical reality. Readers feel they are getting an inside look into an impenetrable world with cultural and historical notes on pages titled “In Iraq” interspersed throughout the book. This personal portrayal of the impact of war and societal upheaval on one family will help many Western readers to see how the past half-century of conflict has devastated a region rich in ancient culture.
Small in size but large in impact, this intimate memoir is a highly relevant and compassionate story of family, community, prejudice, and the struggle to love when the forces of the world push groups apart. (timeline) (Graphic memoir. 10-adult)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77046-293-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Though this will likely be stocked with graphic novels, it shares as much in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff...
Bechdel’s memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity.
Though Bechdel (known for her syndicated “Dykes to Watch Out For” strip and collections) takes her formal cues from comic books, she receives more inspiration from the likes of Proust and Joyce as she attempts to unravel the knots of her family’s twisted emotional history. At the core of this compelling narrative is her relationship with her father, a literary-minded high-school teacher who restores and runs the familial funeral parlor. (It is also the family’s residence and the “fun home” of the title.) Beneath his icy reserve and fussy perfectionism, he is a barely closeted homosexual and a suspected pedophile, an imposing but distant presence to his young daughter, who finds that their main bond is a shared literary sensibility. As she comes of age as an artist and comes to terms with her own sexual identity, Bechdel must also deal with the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and, soon afterward, her father’s death. Was it an accident or was it suicide? How did her father’s sexuality shape her own? Rather than proceeding in chronological fashion, the memoir keeps circling back to this central relationship and familial tragedy, an obsession that the artist can never quite resolve or shake. The results are painfully honest, occasionally funny and penetratingly insightful. Feminists, lesbians and fans of underground comics will enthusiastically embrace this major advance in Bechdel’s work, which should significantly extend both her renown and her readership.
Though this will likely be stocked with graphic novels, it shares as much in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment.Pub Date: June 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-47794-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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A problematic but powerful Holocaust survival memoir.
Mother and daughter go on the run in Nazi-occupied Hungary, then endure the Russian occupation.
It would be difficult to conceive of Katin’s debut as anything but a graphic novel, given the strength of its visuals, but a straight-text approach might have been wiser. Her story is obviously dramatic. In Budapest circa 1944, when Miriam is a young girl, her mother, Esther, decides to avoid the impending Nazi roundup of Jews by faking their deaths and escaping to the countryside with forged papers. But things hardly improve outside the city, where villagers treat them no better in their new identities, taking their dark features to mean they’re gypsies. To make matters worse, a Nazi officer quickly figures out the Katins’ secret and uses it as a means of prying sexual favors from Esther. Hard circumstances turn desperate once the Red Army sweeps through, exhibiting the morals of drunken Vikings; Esther joins the starving, freezing villagers as they take clothes off soldiers’ corpses. She does her best to conceal all these horrific events from little Miriam, though the best she can manage is to induce a sort of baffled confusion. Katin’s episodic approach conveys events with an admirable economy at times, but often just hurries the reader through situations that could have used more explanation or context. The artwork’s smeared, sketchy quality contributes to this sense of undue haste. It may be that Katin chose the graphic form because of her background (she was a graphic artist in Israel and a background designer for Disney and MTV) rather than because it was the best vehicle for her story. However, the author’s pain is difficult to ignore, regardless of the limitations of her approach and her sometimes melodramatic tone.
A problematic but powerful Holocaust survival memoir.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-896597-20-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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