A heartfelt and vivid portrait of war trauma.
A woman looks back on her harrowing refugee experience.
Mila has a photo Papa took of her a few hours before they were forced to leave home. She doesn’t recognize the 9-year-old she sees in the picture, a somber, worried girl in a dark dress with short lace-up boots. In the days before they fled an unnamed country, Mila often slept, dissociating from the bombs filling the sky with smoke. Every night she dreamed about waiting in a never-ending line with her family while holding onto a suitcase. It wasn’t just Mila who was wondering what awaited them on the other side. The line was all anyone in her village talked about. “The clouds that crept closer and closer, adrift above our heads, clouds that seemed to come from nowhere…were they coming from the burning houses of my friends?” Mila pondered solemnly as the bombing escalated. That was when she and her family joined the line to seek refuge from their war-torn homeland. Twenty-five years later, although outwardly she may seem to fit in, she observes, “I know I’m different from other people.” The stark, absorbing illustrations evoke a mid-20th-century European setting and capture the introspective narrative with grace. Rendered largely in sepia tones aptly reminiscent of old photos, this graphic novel measures the weight of memories. The sparse pops of red and blue emphasize meaningful visual cues threaded through the work.
A heartfelt and vivid portrait of war trauma. (Graphic fiction. 13-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781774880210
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
A tribute to young people’s resistance in the face of oppression.
In 1983 South Korea, Kim was learning to navigate university and student political activism.
The daughter of modest restaurant owners, Kim was apolitical—she just wanted to make her parents proud and be worthy of her tuition expenses. Following an administrator’s advice to avoid trouble and pursue extracurriculars, she joined a folk dance team where she met a fellow student who invited her into a banned book club. Kim was fearful at first, but her thirst for knowledge soon won out. As she learned the truth of her country’s oppressive fascist political environment, Kim became closer to the other book club members while the authorities grew increasingly desperate to identify and punish student dissidents. The kinetic manhwa drawing style skillfully captures the personal and political history of this eye-opening memoir. The disturbing elements of political corruption and loss of human rights are lightened by moving depictions of sweet, funny moments between friends as well as deft political maneuvering by Kim herself when she was eventually questioned by authorities. The art and dialogue complement each other as they express the tension that Kim and her friends felt as they tried to balance school, family, and romance with surviving in a dangerous political environment. References to fake news and a divisive government make this particularly timely; the only thing missing is a list for further reading.
A tribute to young people’s resistance in the face of oppression. (Graphic memoir. 14-adult)Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945820-42-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Iron Circus Comics
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read.
Through honest and powerful vignettes, Jewell’s latest stitches together a collective memoir of formative experiences of educational racism and American schooling by people of the global majority.
Anchored by the author’s narrative of navigating school as a “light-skinned Black biracial cis-female” in a working-class neighborhood of a city in New York state, the work incorporates both her experiences of being labeled and othered in school as well as the first-person experiences of people of various ages, ethnicities, races, and genders, who write about how they navigated and were affected by systemic racism in their K-12, college, and postgraduate educations. The contributors include well-known authors of young people’s literature including Joanna Ho, Minh Lê, and Randy Ribay; writers and educators such as Lorena and Roberto Germán, Torrey Maldonado, and Gayatri Sethi; and two entries by teens from Portland, Oregon. Alongside stories of segregation, mistreatment by white educators, hypervisibility, surveillance, stereotyping, pigeonholing, and exclusion, this collection asks readers to “envision what freedom in schools might be.” These bold tales of truth telling are interspersed with historical facts, definitions, and anti-racist pedagogy that emphasize and contextualize the reality that, while experiences of racism in educational systems evolve with each generation, one constant is that schools are microcosms of larger systems of inequality and institutional oppression in the world beyond classroom walls.
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read. (resources, recommended reading, references, about the contributors) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780358638315
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Versify/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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