Will strongly evoke both thought-provoking insights and empathy.
Eleven storytellers chronicle their journeys from places all over the world—including Guatemala, Chad, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan—to the United States.
Each story compellingly details a variety of experiences the individual immigrant or refugee had, highlighting differences between stories that too often are lumped together or not given an opportunity to be heard. Each storyteller was paired with an illustrator from a similar linguistic and cultural heritage. The thoughtfulness of the matches shines through, as every panel authentically conveys the narrators’ poignant and emotional memories, highlighting the beauty of their homelands and the cultures they still identify with. The narratives show the struggles and triumphs of acclimating to a new language, culture, and worldview as well as dealing with obstacles like racism and microaggressions. Readers meet remarkable people like Zaynab Abdi from Yemen, whose story is illustrated by Egyptian American artist Ashraf El-Attar in stark black and white. Her harrowing journey was filled with sorrow and trauma yet, when she finally settled in Minnesota, she found purpose and opportunity through hard work and activism, speaking at the United Nations about girls’ education in Yemen. Each profile opens with brief biographies and photos or drawings of the storytellers and artists along with website URLs for learning more about them. Glossaries following many of the stories define potentially unfamiliar terms. The vibrant diversity of artistic styles offers pleasing variety within the unifying thematic framework of the volume.
Will strongly evoke both thought-provoking insights and empathy. (Graphic nonfiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949523-17-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Green Card Voices
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
A flawed history.
Veteran graphic novelist Hoskin (The Taj Mahal, 2019, etc.) turns to the history of astronomy and the fight for heliocentrism.
Humans have been stargazers for as long as we know, and contributions to the science of astronomy have come from cultures all over the world. Here, Hoskin and illustrator Kumar (Hamlet, 2019, etc.) use the graphic-novel format to present a pivotal point in the history of science. Through the 1500s and 1600s, amid the Reformation and dawning of Enlightenment in Europe, astronomers Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo used advances in data and mathematics to make a case against the long-held view that the Earth is the center of the universe, around which all else rotates. While stories of the three astronomers whose work at times ran afoul of the Catholic Church are presented, the work of other relevant and notable scientists is completely left out, including the early heliocentrist Aristarchus, while others, like Kepler, receive only a passing mention. It is clear the author is presenting a case of science versus the church more than a full history of how a sun-centered universe (and later solar system) came to be accepted. This along with other errant or confusing statements makes for uneven reading. Backmatter presents information about how the planets got their names as well as the history of the Indian space program and notable Indian scientists.
A flawed history. (planetary information, timelines, biographies) (Graphic nonfiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-93-81182-96-3
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt, well-deserved tribute but a muddle for readers not already familiar with the story.
A graphic account of the lives and tragic ends of the young anti-Nazi White Rose martyrs.
Aside from dates, glimpses of documents, and a few invented lines of dialogue, Ciponte’s sketchy narrative text is largely a mix of quotations from classic German writers, Nazi propaganda, and snippets of rhetoric drawn directly from the six exhortatory leaflets (all of which are provided in full as backmatter in an English translation by Arthur R. Schultz) that the White Rose printed and distributed before its abrupt end. This leaves it to the art to create a storyline, and it’s not up to the task, being arranged in loosely sequenced panels, marked by confusingly abrupt changes in time and locale, in which watery figures with hard-to-distinguish features are either posed in static groups or portrayed in head shots. Reproductions of official reports serve in place of explicit depictions of the executions. Russell Freedman’s We Will Not Be Silent (2016) and Kip Wilson’s White Rose (2019) offer a more coherent picture of the short careers of Sophie Scholl and her fellow protesters, but readers will come away appreciating the courage it took for these young collegians to stand up as they did. Though the leaflets are almost unreadably cerebral, they do serve as primary sources for the White Rose’s message.
A heartfelt, well-deserved tribute but a muddle for readers not already familiar with the story. (Graphic nonfiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-87486-344-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Plough
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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