A striking love letter to art and family—both blood and chosen.
In Ferris’ debut graphic novel, a young queer girl in 1960s Chicago sees herself as a classic movie monster beset by small minds, big hearts, and a murder that hits too close to home.
Young Karen Reyes has a recurring dream in which she sheds her girly trappings and euphorically transforms into a werewolf. As her body radically reshapes, Karen lets loose a howl that winds through the streets of Chicago, drawing to her an angry mob (or "m.o.b.," made up of “mean, ordinary & boring” people) ready to kill. But Karen is less concerned with death than she is with becoming mean, ordinary, and boring herself. In her waking life, artistic Karen faces bullies zeroed in on her queerness; family crises with a sick mother and an unbalanced brother; and a frustrating crush on Missy, a former best friend who dropped Karen for the popular girls after her mom forbade her from watching any more late-night monster movies with Karen because, as she tells Karen, "people of your class never protect their kids from bad influences." Into this bubbling cauldron of prepubescence drops the murder of Karen’s troubled neighbor, Anka Silverberg, whose death might be tied to her past being sold for sex as a child in Nazi Germany; or to her husband’s connection to a local mobster; or to her affair with Karen’s bad-boy brother, Deeze, an artist. Karen dons a hat and trench coat and starts sleuthing, uncovering hard truths, making new friends on the fringes, and communing with the paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago, a transcendent place introduced to her by Deeze. Ferris’ work is doodling par excellence: Her pen on lined notebook paper—complete with spiral binding and holes—achieves sculptural depth with layered linework and crosshatching, while less-detailed panels carry the charm of a comic strip.
A striking love letter to art and family—both blood and chosen.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 9781606999592
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
Immensely enjoyable.
The debut graphic novel from Mohamed presents a modern Egypt full of magical realism where wishes have been industrialized and heavily regulated.
The story opens with a televised public service announcement from the General Committee of Wish Supervision and Licensing about the dangers of “third-class wishes”—wishes that come in soda cans and tend to backfire on wishers who aren’t specific enough (like a wish to lose weight resulting in limbs falling from the wisher’s body). Thus begins a brilliant play among magic, the mundane, and bureaucracy that centers around a newsstand kiosk where a devout Muslim is trying to unload the three “first-class wishes” (contained in elegant glass bottles and properly licensed by the government) that have come into his possession, since he believes his religion forbids him to use them. As he gradually unloads the first-class wishes on a poor, regretful widow (who then runs afoul of authorities determined to manipulate her out of her valuable commodity) and a university student who seeks a possibly magical solution to their mental health crisis (but struggles with whether a wish to always be happy might have unintended consequences), interstitials give infographic histories of wishes, showing how the Western wish-industrial complex has exploited the countries where wishes are mined (largely in the Middle East). The book is exceptionally imaginative while also being wonderfully grounded in touching human relationships, existential quandaries, and familiar geopolitical and socio-economic dynamics. Mohamed’s art balances perfectly between cartoon and realism, powerfully conveying emotions, and her strong, clean lines gorgeously depict everything from an anguished face to an ornate bottle. Charts and graphs nicely break up the reading experience while also concisely building this larger world of everyday wishes. Mohamed has a great sense of humor, which comes out in footnotes and casual asides throughout.
Immensely enjoyable.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-524-74841-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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