Though a bit of a period piece, a lovely and wholehearted coming-out story.
From Belgium, the graphic novel on which the 2013 Palme d’Or–winning film of the same name was based.
Clementine is 15 in 1994 when she sees a beautiful young woman with blue hair crossing the plaza. That night, the woman figures in an erotic dream, and her world is rocked. “I had no right to have thoughts like that.” When she meets blue-haired Emma for real, she begins an at-first platonic relationship with the art student, who tells Clementine of her own coming out. The relationship turns sexual (graphically, beautifully so) and complicated. The story is told in flashback; readers meet a years-older Emma in the aftermath of Clementine’s funeral as she reads Clementine’s teenage diaries. The late-2000s scenes are somber and washed with blues, while the bulk of the tale is drawn in delicate black, gray and white with strategic highlights of blue. The text is occasionally clunky and purposive—“We do not choose the one we fall in love with, and our perception of happiness is our own and is determined by what we experience…”—but the illustrations are infused with genuine, raw feeling. Wide-eyed Clementine wears every emotion on her sleeve, and even if today’s teens will feel that her mid-’90s experience is rather antique, they will understand her journey perfectly.
Though a bit of a period piece, a lovely and wholehearted coming-out story. (Graphic historical fiction. 16 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55152-514-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.
A tour of calculus from the polymath whose illustrated guides have illuminated a wide range of subjects, from genetics and sex to the environment and the universe.
This time out, unfortunately, Muse cartoonist Gonick’s (The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2, 2009, etc.) presentation is labored, the cartoons are primarily decorative and the course is tough. To begin with, calculus requires four years of high-school math, which the author reprises in the first 50 pages. For many readers this will be a slog through algebra, trigonometry, exponentials, function theory, etc. While most texts map equations onto lines or curves on a standard x-y axis, Gonick introduces parallel lines with arrows connecting an x value on one line to its f(x) value on the parallel line. This approach is particularly unhelpful when you want to visualize, say, minute changes of position (on the y axis) over time (on the x axis). Nor does the author discuss fundamental concepts like continuity or maxima and minima until well into the chapters on the derivative and differential calculus. While he does highlight fundamental theorems and classic rules, Gonick devotes too much space to how-to manipulations like how to differentiate inverse functions. The narrative improves when the author introduces the concept of the integral as the sum of skinny rectangles under a curve, and Gonick provides many helpful, practical examples of how calculus is used.
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-168909-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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