HABIBI

Name: HABIBI
Author: Craig Thompson
ISBN: 978-0-375-42414-4

by Craig Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2011

A mature—in all its meanings—glimpse into a world few Westerners are at home with, and Thompson is respectful throughout.

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Thompson (Good-Bye, Chunky Rice, 2006, etc.) returns after a five-year absence with a graphic novel that is sure to attract attention—and perhaps even controversy.

Slavery exists in the modern world as much as in the ancient. As Thompson’s long, carefully drawn narrative opens, we are in a time that seems faraway, even mythical: A 9-year-old girl is married off to a scribe who introduces her not just to sex but also to the mysteries of Arabic letters, which seem to take life on the page. “When God created the letters,” Thompson writes, “He kept their secrets for Himself”—though he shared them with Adam while keeping them from the angels, a source of considerable friction in the Muslim heaven. The scribe is killed, the young girl kidnapped, and from there the story opens into a world that might well have come from the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, if, that is, industrial machinery and the teeming ports of the Arabian peninsula are introduced into the backdrop. Dodola and Zam are two children, one Semitic, one black African, who brave a hostile world, taking up residence in a ship marooned in the desert sands, selling what they have and can in order to survive. As they grow older, they find themselves feeling things that are not quite appropriate for the siblings they seem to have become, and now their paths part, destined to cross again as sure as the letters loop over one another. Thompson draws on elements of classical Arabic mythology and, a touch dangerously, Islamic belief; he also takes the opportunity to address modern issues of ethnic tension, racism, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the clash of civilizations, sexism and other modern concerns. Though in the form of a comic book, Thompson’s story is decidedly not for youngsters: Rape and murder figure in these pages, as does sex between minors.

A mature—in all its meanings—glimpse into a world few Westerners are at home with, and Thompson is respectful throughout.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-375-42414-4

Page Count: 672

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011

Categories:

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

- BOOK REVIEW
GINSENG ROOTS
by Craig Thompson

- BOOK REVIEW
GOOD-BYE, CHUNKY RICE
by Craig Thompson

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THE VIOLENT CHILD

by Michael Sheridan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2001

Newcomer Sheridan makes too much haste toward a happy ending, but, still, his first is a moving, unflinching portrait of...

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A family drama in two acts, Sheridan's debut is a sensitive study of working-class perils as a boy-turned-man struggles to love the tough but fragile contradiction that is his mother.

Lorraine is a hard-drinking, oxygen-toting, wheelchair-bound wreck who still lives in the inner-city neighborhood where she raised her son Teddie. Though he's long since moved on to become a somewhat respectable college professor, Teddie still visits Lorraine, still cares for her in the detached way he's learned to protect himself, and still matches her bourbon for bourbon in spite of having taken the pledge. But he remains baffled by her. As they sit in Lorraine’s filthy apartment, boys from the ’hood outside being paid to watch Teddie's wheels so they don't get stolen, mother and son cover the same ground as always. Teddie's early childhood is full of fractures: days or nights spent with his father's parents while Lorraine worked different shifts at the steel mill; times spent with Lorraine as she cursed his drunken, absent father; rare but ineluctable visits from Dad—the time when he came to them bleeding profusely from a barroom brawl, or when he snuck Teddie into the bar while he got drunk with his girlfriend, only to be caught by Lorraine and beaten by her steelworker friend Trudy after he broke his wife's wrist. Teddie recalls the change in Lorraine after his sister was born dead, when depression gripped her and wouldn't let go. And he cannot forget the close of his family melodrama, when in the bitter divorce proceedings he had to choose between his grandparents, his drunken dad, and his depressed mama, who had taken up with the lesbian Trudy. Though long shadowed by this past, Teddie does love Lorraine and finally takes the step that will lay those memories to rest.

Newcomer Sheridan makes too much haste toward a happy ending, but, still, his first is a moving, unflinching portrait of filial duty and tough motherly love.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-57962-035-3

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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SUNDAY’S SILENCE

by Gina B. Nahai ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2001

Well intentioned, though the tale—partly of Appalachia, partly of Middle East—loses more strength than it gains through...

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A sensitive if uncompelling exploration of cultural alienation: an abandoned son searches for understanding and redemption after his snake-handling father is fatally bitten.

The member of a notorious Appalachian sect who handles venomous snakes and ingests poison during religious services to prove his faith should be an intriguing subject—especially if, like Little Sam Jenkins, the figure also seduces young women, fathers numerous children, and cynically uses his preaching gifts to win fame and sexual favors. Even so, the Iranian-born Nahai (Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, 1999, etc.) adds a second story, this one with Middle Eastern origins. Sunday’s Silence opens when journalist Adam Watkins, stationed in Beirut, learns that Little Sam Adams has been killed by a snake handed to him during a service by a woman named Blue. Little Sam had married Watkins’s grandmother, a coal miner’s widow, then later had had an affair with Clare, her teenaged and sexually precocious daughter, who gave birth to Adam, tried to raise him, finally left him in a local orphanage. Now back in Knoxville, Adam tries to discover more about both Little Sam and the beautiful Blue Kerdi, the wife of an elderly professor. He soon meets her, and the two begin an affair, as Blue tells him her life story. The daughter of Kurds, one Muslim and one Jewish, she was raised as a nomad and married young in Iran to a professor, a nonpracticing Jew. In Knoxville, she joined Sam’s sect because the members made her feel welcome. As Adam learns about his family’s hard life and recalls his own years in the orphanage, he also hears why Blue killed Little Sam. And when the professor is found dead, with Blue is suspected of poisoning him, Adam realizes he must stay and fight.

Well intentioned, though the tale—partly of Appalachia, partly of Middle East—loses more strength than it gains through being double-stranded.