Informative, gripping, and humanizing.
A boy coming-of-age in war-torn Syria tells the story of his family’s struggle and survival as they are attacked from within and without.
As a child, Muhammad always felt safe in his father’s carpentry shop in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. That is, until Assad’s soldiers arrived. Protests against Syria’s authoritarian regime started in March 2011, when he was 8, and Muhammad grew up fast. By the time he was 13, he had lost his beloved father, a man who helped people and listened to their stories; his home; and his pet parrot, all to Syrian government aggression. Muhammad got an idea to help keep him going: He would interview other children and show the world what was happening. Maybe then, help would come. Aided by his photojournalist brother and English teacher sister, he braved dangers, embraced his fears, and reported over social media to a global audience. This brought him into contact with CNN reporter and co-author Neus. Mohammad’s story is one of a normal family—with playful teasing between siblings, people falling in love and marrying, new babies arriving, and recollections of favorite foods—set against a backdrop of scarcity and grief. Expressive full-color illustrations capture heartbreaking moments of loss as well as the warmth of extended family. Readers will find this a valuable window into the struggle, resistance, and humanity of the Syrian people during this ongoing crisis.
Informative, gripping, and humanizing. (photo credits, afterword, note by Neus, recipe, photos) (Graphic memoir. 10-16)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5690-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown Ink
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A neatly coherent account with tweaks that allow readers some emotional distance—but not enough to shrug off the war’s...
In the latest of his Hazardous Tales (One Dead Spy, 2012, etc.), Hale recaps World War I with an all-animal cast.
Any similarities to Art Spiegelman’s Maus are doubtless coincidental. Per established series formula, a frame tale finds the author’s more-renowned namesake holding off the hangman, Scheherazade-like, with tales from our country’s future history. In this volume, he covers the war’s prelude, precipitation, major campaigns and final winding down in small but reasonably easy-to-follow two-color panels. At the hangman’s request, narrator Hale both tucks in a few jokes and transforms the opposing armies into animal-headed soldiers—from Gallic roosters and British bulldogs to, as “eagle” was already taken by the Germans, American bunnies. Despite lightening the load in this manner and shying away from explicit brutality, Hale cogently conveys the mind-numbing scale of it all as well as the horrors of trench warfare. He presents with equal ease the strategic and tactical pictures, technological innovations from poison gas to tanks, and related developments such as the Russian Revolution. After the cease fire, which he attributes more to exhaustion than battlefield victory, he closes with a summary of the war’s human toll and geopolitical changes.
A neatly coherent account with tweaks that allow readers some emotional distance—but not enough to shrug off the war’s devastating cost and world-changing effects. (bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-13)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0808-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
There’s a lot to absorb even in this abbreviated form, but the visual approach lightens the load considerably.
A cartoon history of the tumultuous 450-year period in Chinese history known as the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.”
Using common-era dating and (excepting “Confucius”) Pinyin transcription for names, Liu begins the third of a four-volume history with a quick thematic recap of early Chinese civilization and the arrival of the Liao dynasty in 907. He then carries readers through to the capture of the Yuan (Mongol) capital by an unidentified “rebel army” in 1368. Though he takes only rare side glances at cultural or scientific highlights (such as the inventions of gunpowder and paper currency), he pauses in his account of successive, sometimes overlapping rises, falls, and major battles to describe Neo-Confucian precepts in some detail, as keys to understanding enduring aspects of Chinese character and outlook. In the monochrome art, dialogue more often runs to such lines as “We lost the Silk Road, let’s make up for it through sea trade” than personal interchanges. Still, the combination of silhouettes—often threatening, martial ones—with open-faced, expressively individualized figures of many social classes adds dramatic tension while neatly balancing the big-picture narrative.
There’s a lot to absorb even in this abbreviated form, but the visual approach lightens the load considerably. (maps, diagrams, recommended reading) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-14)Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61172-034-1
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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