Beautiful illustrations can't quite save an overly simplistic graphic novel.
A touching tale of friendship during World War II.
The debut graphic novel from Tuininga opens in 1987, with a man walking to a Sephardic synagogue in Seattle to attend his grandfather’s funeral. “My name is Marco,” he explains. “I was named after my papoo. My grandfather.” At the service, he notices mourners from “a different neighborhood,” one of whom signs the guest book with the name Sam Akiyama. The younger Marco introduces himself to Sam and learns that the man befriended his grandfather during the early days of World War II. The elder Marco, a Jewish immigrant from the Ottoman Empire, was horrified when he learned that after the invasion of Pearl Harbor, Sam and his family—along with many other Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans—would likely be imprisoned in camps under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s now-infamous Executive Order 9066. Tuininga briefly depicts the Akiyama family’s imprisonment and then their return to Seattle and later reveals that Marco had been working behind the scenes to save their home and business. “Some say all it took was a little research and some paperwork,” the younger Marco explains. “While others say the only thing needed was a simple handshake.” Tuininga’s illustrations are uniformly beautiful, with mostly dark, understated colors that match the anxieties of the era; his characters’ facial expressions convey their emotions beautifully. Some of the most powerful pages in the book are ones that lack dialogue, such as a spread in which Marco fishes alone, missing his friend Sam. The writing is less successful, heavy on exposition—Tuininga understandably wants the book to be as much history lesson as novel, and it turns heavy-handed in parts. The book needs more story, more detail; as it is, it feels unfinished. The artwork is undeniable, but one wishes the narrative were more than the broad strokes.
Beautiful illustrations can't quite save an overly simplistic graphic novel.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781419759949
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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