Smile by Raina Telgemeier: Another Great Graphic Novel

I am usually a read-one-book-at-a-time type of reader. But I could not resist that cover. It begs to be picked up. I ended up reading the book straight through.

When twelve year old Raina loses her two front teeth – her permanent teeth – it seems like the end of the world. Through years of braces, headgear, retainers, middle school and high school Raina learns who her true friends are and how to be happy with herself.
I’ve yet to read a graphic novel I haven’t liked. And Smile by Raina Telgemeier is no exception. It has such an uplifting message for young girls and is an enjoyable read. Telgemeier is not only a great writer but a great artist. The pictures are all in color and do a nice job of capturing the emotion of each moment. There were some funny moments when I chuckled and some tender ones when I teared up. From experiencing your first crush to worrying about pimples, there’s something in this book for every girl. In a time of life when girls feel pressured to mature quickly, I appreciated how Smile portrays an innocent who’s happy to be that way. Raina realizes she doesn’t have to follow her friends into makeup and kissing if she’s not ready. As you likely noticed, the character and author’s name are the same. That’s because this is a true story which makes it even better!
Publisher: Scholastic, 2010     Pages: 218
Rating: 5 Stars     Recommended Age: 10 and up     Source: IC Public Library

Persepolis II: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi

In Persepolis II, Marjane’s parents send her to Vienna where she lives by herself and grows up quickly. It is an extremely difficult time for Marjane. After four years, she returns to Iran at age 18 with emotional baggage and conflicted feelings. In this poignant sequel, Marjane is a woman of two worlds, feeling western and Iranian but not fully accepted by either culture.

Persepolis II highlights the subjugation and chauvinism exuded by the state that makes it hard for free thinkers to live in Iran. Although the war with Iraq is over, fear is ever prevalent as Marjane and her friends dodge the “guardians of the Islamic revolution.” Marjane struggles to find companions with similar ideologies and often feels alone. This text shows how precious our freedom of speech is as we watch Marjane become paranoid about how she speaks, dresses and draws advertisements for work.

Book two is much more serious as Marjane deals with the burdens of adulthood. She turns to radical friends, smoking, drinking and relationships in an attempt to find a place and purpose for herself. It is her strong will that keeps her going, but even her will wavers when she experiences a severe depression leading to an attempted suicide. As she realizes the extent of the state’s control over her life, Marjane’s perception of and hope in her country changes. I found Marjane’s story to be captivating. She has lead a challenging life to say the least. Her memoir allows readers a peek into a very conservative and foreign culture and how many people there continue to hope for change and peace.
Publisher: Pantheon, 2004     Recommended Age: 15 and up
Source: IC Public Library       Pages: 187
Rating: 4 Stars

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi chronicles her life when growing up during the Islamic revolution. When the Shah is overthrown Marjane and her family are overjoyed but soon realize that their hopes for liberty are being thwarted by a new and powerful regime. While she and her family hold onto their freedom (with clandestine card parties and music bought from the black market) the war with Iraq breaks out, increasing tensions among Iranians as they fight over religion and food supplies. From the innocent and often naïve perspective of childhood, Satrapi presents a dissident voice during a troubling time.

Can one be patriotic and dissident at the same time? The Satrapi family loves their country so much they do not want to leave despite the increasing violence and subjugation. They love their culture, friends and family and feel their life in Iran is better than what it could be anywhere else, including the United States. They want to make their home a better place by staying rather than leaving. It is the people that define a nation and Marjane’s parents want to be a part of that definition. Despite the context she grows up in, Marjane is a typical teenager who wants to go to parties and listen to popular music. Marjane is resilient after all she sees and experiences during protests and war. Seeing Marjane as a typical kid should make it easier for U.S. kids to identify with her and put themselves in her shoes and to ask how they would have felt if they were Marjane’s maid, neighbor or if they were Marjane herself.

I read this book in one sitting and enjoyed it a lot. The text offered an inside perspective of a third-world country that I would likely have never seen otherwise. It shows us what it was/is like for women who are forced to wear the veil. Marjane’s spunky attitude kept me hooked. It was amazing that she never asked the reader for sympathy or pity but to simply listen to her story. She just wants her side of the story, the unheard part of the truth, to be told.
Publisher: Pantheon Books, 2004     Source: IC Public Library                  Pages: 160
Rating: 5 Stars                                  Recommended Age: 13 and up

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Hugo, an orphan living in Paris in the 1930s, is good with building and repairing mechanical things. He devotes himself to repairing a special automaton and many secrets are brought to light by his efforts. The inspiration for the book was a real automaton. In the acknowledgments, Selznick gives this address for watching the original automatons write and draw: http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/automaton/automaton.php?cts=instrumentation. Pretty cool!

This book is most easily defined as a graphic novel, but it is more a hybrid between a novel and a graphic novel. The drawings have their own pages as do the written parts which read like a traditional story, not like cartoons with speech bubbles. The drawings inform the reader as much as the text. They are not simply illustrations but are a part of the narrative. Reading the book is similar to watching an old silent movie with black and white pictures followed by text. This is fitting since the book explores the work of early movie maker Georges Melies as well as other early films. Original pictures from these early movies are in the book including a picture of the very first film of a train pulling into a station. I can envision this book being very popular with elementary students who are interested in how movies were invented and why people began making them. There is a lot of interactive material available via the web to enhance the reading experience.

The Invention is unique because of the way it presents the story. However, the story was a little slow. I was disappointed with the “secret” that is unveiled. I expected something more dramatic considering all the effort that Hugo gave in order to reveal it. But it is a really cute story and Hugo is a likable character.
Publisher: Scholastic, 2007     Recommended Age: 8 and up
Source: IC Public Library        Pages: 533 (284 are drawings)
Rating: 3.5 Stars                    More on this author at: http://www.theinventionofhugocabret.com/index.htm

Maus: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman

Another great graphic novel! Maus II picks up where book one left off. Art, the graphic novelist, is still recording conversations with his father. Vladek Spiegelman begins his story again, entering the gates of Auschwitz to endure unimaginable terrors. The novel opens with Art’s misgivings about drawing Vladek’s experience during WWII and about the man he became after the war. Art admits feeling presumptuous and feels the weight of his project. Perhaps more than the first novel, Maus II highlights Art’s conflicted feelings for Vladek. He feels deep respect for his father but struggles to love the miserly and racist man his father is. Moments of such honesty keep readers from idolizing Vladek but to respect his story, to learn what we can from it and to understand each person has his or her own history. And from our personal histories we construct our world view. I think that is one lesson (even though the novelist says he intended no “message”) I get out of reading Maus. Art finds it difficult to be around his father and I think he wants to know Vladek’s story so badly because he desires to understand Vladek’s history, to know the whole person who is his father. Vladek and his wife survive the war but are forever altered.

Maus I/II is a wonderful text to introduce young people to WWII/ the holocaust. It is honest about war cruelties but is not gory. There is some swearing and a few naked mice but nothing graphic or sexual. My recommended age is 13 only because I feel kids much younger may not appreciate the relationship between Art, a grown man, and his elderly father. But don’t let the YA tag fool you. Adults can appreciate Maus as much as young people. It's not strictly a children's story by any stretch. Highly recommended!
Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1991 Recommended Age: 13 and up
Source: IC Public Library              Pages: 136
Rating: 5 Stars

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

From the creation of the world to the death of Joseph, Crumb displays the first book of the Bible with blunt black and white drawings. The depictions sway from respectful to sardonic but on the whole Crumb appears to have presented the text without adding much of his own commentary. Of course, any artistic interpretation of Biblical passages, from Bernini to Crumb, cannot help but reflect personal readings. In the intro, Crumb plainly states that he believes the Bible to be only myth. And he seems to put women into scenes, as active participants in daily life, even if the text doesn’t mention them being there. Obviously, women were there doing something to keep children fed and crops from dying.

What I liked best about this graphic novel is that Crumb didn’t try to sum up an episode by adding his own text of what he felt an individual might say but he draws straight from the Old Testament book– all 50 chapters as the cover advertises. What I didn’t like was all the nudity. If the text says so and so has sex with so and so then I can at least understand why a sex scene is included. But there were a lot of naked women randomly sprinkled throughout the text that just didn’t need to be there. I got tired of looking at boobies. If you haven’t read Genesis in awhile then let me remind you – it is a mature book. We send children to Sunday school to get the G version. Crumb’s text is the R version. It’s one thing to read or hear about people having sex and another to actually see it. But this was Crumb’s artistic license and he chose to depict every sexual reference. There is no use of prolific fig leaves and few strategically placed pillows. So, there you have it. You’ve been warned.

The people appear simple and stocky. Their emotions are easy to read which emphasizes the love, hatred, fear, jealousy, in essence, all the human emotions that are experienced by the first humans and their decedents. I’m not sure why, but Sarah, who’s supposed to be beautiful, looked ugly to me. As with most of the women she was robust and thick legged but lacked the beauty to capture Pharaoh’s attention. In the back, Crumb admits he doesn’t feel a beautiful woman could attract such attention but just look around at the way beautiful women are treated today and it seems perfectly plausible that Sarah was just a sex object to most men. Sarah’s was the only depiction I felt Crumb didn’t do justice. The clothing, living quarters and terrain felt realistic and enhanced the fact that this is an ancient text with very real and normal humans living out the stories. I liked the depictions of the nine hundred-year-old men all wrinkled and shriveled grasping for their last breaths.

My final thoughts: If you’ve never read the original text do so first. After thousands of years of preservation and compilation it would be a shame to miss out on, arguably, the most influential and revered piece of writing in the world. So, read Genesis from the Bible first. It was not meant to be a visual book or that’s how it would have been done in the first place. That being said, I enjoyed Crumb’s version overall and say, take in stride, with the understanding that Crumb is not a believer, what you find objectionable in his depictions.
Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009     Recommended Age: 17 and up
Source: IC Public Library                                  Pages: 224
Rating: 4 Stars

Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleed's History by Art Spiegelman

Maus (pronounced mouse) is a graphic novel that is easily in my top twenty if not my top ten favorite books. This is not simply a comic book about super heroes. Maus is a true story of love and survival during the Holocaust. The narrative shifts between the present and past while the graphic novelist interviews his father about living in Poland during World War Two. It is a riches to rags story as Spiegelman, Sr. loses all his worldly possessions while dodging the Gestapo for as long as possible. Wars may end but their devastating effects are felt for several generations. The narrative structure allows the reader to see how an entire family, born and unborn, are affected by the persistence of and memory of war. World War Two shaped many lives directly and indirectly as seen in the relationships in the Spiegelman family, especially between father and son.

The graphic part of this novel is genius. Spiegelman chose to portray Jews as mice, Germans (presumably all Nazis) as cats and the Polish as pigs. Apparently, the popular German nickname of Poles was pigs, hence their depiction as such in the novel. The mice motif, depicting Jew as victims hiding in holes in the walls, is challenged by the narrative as we see them, not just as victims but as individuals actively fighting for survival. The way people looked was hugely important, race even more so. Imagine people trying desperately to not “look Jewish” and in the novel trying not to look like a mouse. The symbolism of the animals enhances the feeling of isolation as well as camaraderie in the novel. The art allows for body language to become a visible part of the reading experience which allows emotions to come through in a way that words often fail to capture.

Maus was a big surprise. I didn’t expect this kind of experience from a graphic novel. This is my favorite WWII text for sure followed by The Hiding Place and then Last Man Out. Oddly they are all nonfiction which is something I usually don’t get into. But it makes sense that true stories are the most touching and inspiring. I could go on but if you read it for yourself you’ll understand why I like it.
Publisher: Random House, 1986 (originally, 1973) Recommended Age: 13 and up
Source: IC Public Library                                        Pages: 159
Rating: 5 Stars