“This is a like a grand slam of comics memoirs dealing with heavy stuff: race, sexuality, the Holocaust, and cancer, all in one.
I think it ends up feeling overstuffed, and it doesn’t all quite mesh.
I liked the way this worked at first, little diversions, the small rituals or customs of the main characters, that was cool, it was like reading someone’s diary. The voice of the narrator felt authentic because this is how a kid would tell a story.
But there were also a TON of branching stories that were kind of main stories, too. It was like a tree with multiple different trunks and no main, uniting presence at the center. I can handle lots of branches, but I need it to come back to a main idea.
I think what really threw me off is the diversion to 30’s and 40’s Germany. The other parts I can kind of wrap my head around being in the same book, but that section felt like it’s own book wedged into this one. The narration moves away, the storytelling style chances to an adult’s POV…I think, in a book that was less packed with life already, this would work better. But this one has enough going on already that the extra, incongruous layer felt unnecessary.
The art is great, however, and this is a big however, the way the dialog balloons work in the book is inconsistent and unintuitive, and every other page or so I would read the dialog bits out of order. It’s pretty frustrating to read, honestly. I don’t see a lot of mention about this in other reviews, and I have a suspicion that this, being one of those breakthrough graphic novels that NPR listeners read, I wonder if a lot of the readers of this one don’t necessarily read a ton of comics, so they might think that reading it out of order is just sort of the normal way it feels to read comics.
It’s definitely not.
I hate to say it, bad the bad layouts make it so that the words and images are fighting each other instead of working together, and it took a lot away from my enjoyment.
There’s a ton of creative energy here, a unique vision, and I just wish it’d been expressed with a few more concessions to ease of reading. With a book so artistically and narratively rich, portions could’ve been cashed in, sacrificed for clarity and smoothness, and there would still be an embarrassment of riches. “