Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey is a graphic memoir of the author's life as a student in post-coup Turkey where she grew up. This coming of age story takes place in the 1980s and early 1990s covering the author beginning primary school in Izmer and attending college in Istanbul. The artwork includes both doodling and collage work.

Ozge Samanci's parents were both teachers.  Her mother taught sewing at a vocational women's high school and her father taught technical drawing at a vocational men's high school. Her father wanted both Ozge and her older sister Pelin to become engineers so that they could get good jobs and have a better life. Pelin wanted this career but Ozge had other ideas like being an actress, an oceanographer, or an artist. Wanting to please her father, both Pelin and Ozge cram studied in order to get into the best school that would guarantee their admission to the best colleges. Pelin was successful but Ozge could not pass her entrance exams.

While she was growing up Ozge was fascinated by Turkish leader Ataturk and frequently would apologize to his picture when she felt she did not live up to his ideals. She also idealized Jacques Cousteau and had a poster of him up on her bedroom wall. Together they would discuss what Ozge's role in life should be.  

Ozge eventually gets into the college Pelin was attending but could only get in as a math student. After flunking most of her classes she eventually graduates but knows she cannot work as a mathematician. As her Jacques Cousteau poster told her, she had learned how to learn by studying math and was prepared to learn whatever she wanted, including art.

I loved this book. It seems that the ending was abrupt and I believe a sequel is needed to finish the author's story. She is currently a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois where I live. I am curious as to how she got there.

Safe Area Gorazde

Safe Area Gorazde is the story of the town of Gorazde in eastern Bosnia during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s.  It is told from the point of view of the reportage cartoonist Joe Sacco who was a U.N. journalist who traveled there 4 times during the war.  The U. N. had designated Gorazde as a safe area during the war but it was anything but safe. The community had been majority Muslim before the war began but most of them were slaughtered by the Serbs throughout the war.

The story is heavy on the fighting with interludes on silly teenage girls and parties with local residents. Much of the information on Gorazde comes from the author's guide Edin, a grad student.  Also, refugees arriving in Gorazde tell about the atrocities they saw in their hometowns, including mass executions, that they were forced to flee from. There is also information on Yugoslavia from the end of WWII to the beginning of the Bosnian War. After WWII the different ethnicities lived together peacefully under the authoritarian leadership of Tito. After Tito's death, Slobodan Milosevic took power and began inciting ethnic hatred.

While I had read much about this war while it was ongoing, I learned alot about it from the first person accounts that the author provided in the book.

The book offers a good history of this war. History lovers will want to check this one out.

California Dreamin'

I loved, loved, loved this graphic novel. Cass Elliott seems to have been born with that cool attitude that she had during her lifetime. She was cool even as a child. The book covers her life from birth until the release of the Mamas and the Papas first hit song California Dreaming.

She was born with the name Ellen Cohen and was especially adored by her father. As a child she was encouraged to eat because her parents did not have alot to eat when they were young. Cass had a great singing voice from the time she first began to sing. She was born with talent.

The black and white drawings show her becoming more and more overweight as she grew up. It did not bother her at all but when she was old enough to seek music jobs, music producers did not want to hire her because of the weight. As Cass sought the perfect band to sing with she used her strong personality to get ahead. She wanted to sing with a trio called the Journeyman, composed of John, Michelle and Denny. Having pushed her way into their lives she was able to become part of the group and the rest is history.

The book details how the band got their name, how Cass got her stage name, how California Dreaming was composed and how Cass's personality propelled her to success in the music business. I found only one drawback to the book. I had been expecting the artwork to be colored in psychedelic sixties colors. When it came in the mail I was disappointed to see that it was done in black and white drawings. Perhaps that was intentional by the author as the psychedelic sixties began at a time when the book's story ended. I would love to know from the author if this is true.

This book is a must read for anyone coming of age in the sixties or seventies when the music of the Mama's and the Papas was popular. It gives an inside view of one of the greatest music groups of our time.

Threads From the Refugee Crisis

OMG!  I learned so much from this graphic novel on life in a refugee camp in Calais.  The book is about the author's volunteer work at the "Calais Jungle" refugee camp in Calais, France which was dismantled last year. She uses full color graphics and changing font styles to tell her story.

 

In Threads you will meet some refugees, see their living conditions, and hear their stories. 

This is a heavyweight book and it took me some time to get through it. I was shocked at how the camp looked and was run.  I was also shocked by how much the involvement of the local police had a negative effect on the refugees. It seems that while some of the refugees had established a sense of humanity in their living conditions, the police destroyed homes and disrupted that sense of normalcy. The author told a story about a pregnant refugee with 5 year old twins who was beat up by the police for no reason and lost her kids. Having the graphics drawn showed me much more than I have ever learned from a traditional news report. As the inside cover blurb states it is filled with "poignant images-by turns shocking, infuriating, wry and heartbreaking." This is an accurate decription. The images are drawn in a childish style that contrasts with the seriousness of the subject matter.

When I finished reading Threads I felt emotionally upset. The author did a great job at showing the horrors of being a refugee. However, her approach to the political issue of immigration, at the conclusion of the book, will probably only appeal to those who already agree with her viewpoints. I think she could have changed some people's minds about immigration if she had used a different type of appeal. 

Threads is one if the best graphic novels that I have ever read and everyone should read it.

The Undertaking of Lily Chen

The Undertaking of Lily Chen begins with a quote from a July 26, 2007 Economist magazine article "Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called 'ghost marriages.'  Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave.  Sometimes, when a man dies unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a 'wedding,' and bury the couple together... A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides.  Marriage brokers - usually respectable folk who find brides for village men - account for most of the middlemen.  At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors, body snatchers - and now murderers."

The story opens with the death of Deshi Li's brother Wei.  Deshi accidentally kills him during a fight at the air force base where he is stationed.  When he tells his parents that Wei is dead his mother sends him off to bring back a corpse bride for Wei to be buried with so that he is not alone through eternity.  Deshi hires a man to dig up a grave of a woman for him but Deshi is grossed out after seeing the bones of an old corpse and leaves him at the cemetery to seek a "crisp" corpse.  He then begins to travel looking for a bride when he runs across Lily Chen who is getting water from a well for her parents.  Lily joins him believing that he will take her away from her remote village to Beijing for a better life.  Deshi is planning to kill her though.  As they travel they run into some strange folks and Lily's sassiness begins to grow on Deshi.

What makes this book special is the incredible artwork.  The author has used watercolors, pens and inks in her drawings in gorgeous colors that leap off of the page.  She has detailed Chinese papercuts drawn in red as well as colorful landscapes and simple line drawn characters.  This could really be displayed as an art book on a coffee table.  The art is that good.

I cannot recommend this book more highly.  The story was well paced and had an interesting storyline that could actually happen in China today.  Lily is hilarious with her sass.  I love her character.

I give it a 10 out of 5 stars!

Hostage

Hostage is Guy Delisle's newest graphic novel.  It was published last month by Canada's Drawn and Quarterly.  The book recounts the experiences of Christophe Andre who was kidnapped in 1997 in the Caucasus where he was working for Doctors Without Borders.  He was held for four months in Chechnya. The story is told just as Andre told it to the author.

Andre spent his days counting them so that he could keep track of time.  He was held in empty rooms and a closet during his captivity.  In order to remain sane he would replay in his mind old military battles.  He was fed the same soup for every meal of every day.  His thoughts about what his NGO was doing to rescue him and when it might happen created some suspense as you felt that it might actually happen the way he fantasized about it. 

I have read all of Delisle's travelogues and they were cute and humorous. Hostage is a different book.  Not only is it a serious book, the reader cannot help but feel the same thoughts that Andre was feeling, understanding the discomfort of being handcuffed to a radiator, and wondering along with Andre when he will next get some information about his situation.  You feel that you are in that room with him. 

The color scheme is various muted greys for each page which conveys the heavy mood of the story.  It is most appropriate for a tale such as this.

I think that Hostage is Delisle's best book to date.  While his other novels were great they did not contain any suspense and as a mystery reader I appreciate that.