Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

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I will be the very first to admit that my intellectual limitations are considerable. 

I'm an excellent actress, and have made it this far pretending to be a functioning member of society. I've got you all fooled...

...but this book made me feel dumb.

I enjoyed and appreciated Bechdel's Fun Home despite the frequent literary and scholarly references. At times I even felt as thought I was able to follow along. Even if the reader doesn't absorb the deep, philosophical and artistic...um...stuff, her first novel had twists, turns, and engaged the reader. 

In Fun Home she depicted her father's story and how it shaped her own. In Are You My Mother she does the same for her mother. Both books appear to have been therapeutic outlets for the author,  but whereas the first novel was engaging, the second was exhausting. The scholarly references were pervasive and I found myself hoping for action and dynamism. It is as though the reader is sitting in on a very long therapy session. True to life, I suppose, the resolution seems to accept the fact that life's great struggles never resolve themselves neatly.  "Happily ever after" certainly wasn't warranted in Mother and I'm glad that she didn't try to include it. However, the ending felt hurried, unmotivated, and uninspired. 

Nice things to say? Well, of course.The art is excellent and I found the repetition of the same scene from a different angle interesting and innovative. I enjoyed thinking about the subtitle "A Comic Drama." That was clever. 

My thoughts on Fun Home

Arielle's Recommendation: Readers particularly interested in parental psychology will find a treasure in Are You My Mother. For mature audiences.

Bechdel, A. Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2012. Print. ISBN: 9780618982509 Hardcover. U.S. $23.00

Drama by Raina Telgemeier

Places, Everyone!

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         Drama is the word at Eucalyptus Middle School. It seems all of Callie's dreams have come true. So what if her crush, Greg, isn't in to her. She's designing the set for the the school musical, working with her friends on stage crew, AND Jesse, the new guy, seems to be just her type! But Drama has a way of catching up with you; and just when she thought things couldn't get better...they all fall apart.

Beautiful illustrations, bright colors, and expressive characters make this story come alive!

Telgemeier demonstrates the new realities of being in middle school with humor, style, and grace. Jealousy, embarrassment, sexuality, friendship, and family are all explored in an innovative and captivating way.

Arielle Recommendation: Much like Telgemeier's popular Smile, Drama is a quick read and explores some of the lesser represented realities of middle school. While Callie isn't an especially dynamic character she's easy to relate to and likable. Character's discussions of homosexuality are respectful and brief and may leave some younger readers with more questions than answers. This is a great pick for reluctant readers as the illustrations are so captivating and fun and the dialogue is substantial. This book definitely belongs on public library shelves and in school libraries where graphic novels are popular. Recommend Drama to reluctant readers, drama geeks, and graphic novel lovers. 

Telgemeier, Raina. Drama. New York, NY: Graphix, 2012.  Print. ISBN: 9780545326988 Pages: 233 Hardbound U.S. $23.99

Annie On My Mind

Garden, Nancy. Annie On My Mind. 1982. New York: Ferrar Straus Giroux, 2007. Print. ISBN: 978-0374404147 Pages: 233 Hardcover U.S. $16.99

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Awards:
ALA Best Book for Young Adults
ALA/ YALSA Best of the Best
Booklist Best
Bookseller's Choice
ALA/ YALSA 100 Best Books for YA

Annotation: Annie and Liza discover their romantic feelings and how their feelings have the power to impact the world around them.

Annie On My Mind

by Nancy Garden

A revolutionary piece of GLBTQ literature, Annie On My Mind follows Liza as she realizes her feelings for Annie and how they impact her understanding of herself.

“I went downstairs to Dad’s encyclopedia and looked up HOMOSEXUALITY, but that didn’t tell me much about any of the things I felt. What struck me most, though, was that, in the whole long article, the word ‘love’ wasn’t used even once. That made me mad; it was as if whoever wrote the article didn’t know that gay people actually love each other. The encyclopedia writers ought to talk to me, I though as I went back to bed; I could tell them something about love.”

Liza has everything going for her; she’s student body president and planning on pursuing her dreams of attending MIT and becoming an architect. When she meets Annie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art their friendly magnetism quickly becomes an intense passion that neither of them had expected. For the two lovers their senior year of high school is a fairy tale story until a teacher discovers them together and everything suddenly and devastatingly falls apart.

Liza’s powerful conflict keeps the drama going to the very last page. Join Liza and Annie as they discover the definition of “love.”

"The story of two young women who love each other. It is an honest portrayal of their love with an ending that is in keeping with, and worthy of, the rest of the book."--The Baltimore Sun

"Annie on My Mind was an eye-opener (maybe 'heartopener' is a better term)."--The Milwaukee Journal

"A tender, bittersweet love story."--Booklist

"Departs from the fact-packed preachiness of the problem novel to become instead a compelling story of two real and intriguing women. There have been many books for teenagers, fiction and nonfiction, that give lots of useful and accurate information about homosexuality; here's one that tells what it feels like, one that has, finally, romance."--School Library Journal

Boolist Reviewers' Choice, Gay Book Award nominee, Golden Kite Award, ALA Best Books 1982, ALA Best of the Best 1983, Booklist Best Books of the 1982, Booksellers' Choice List 1993, ALA Best Books for YAS for Past 25 Years 1994, Mock Printz Award 1982 in contest held at ALA's Midwinter in 2002

Check out  Nancy Garden's website for a list of her books, useful links, and information about school and library visits.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Bechdel, A. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Print. ISBN: 9781417823147 Hardcover. U.S. $25.00

Awards:

2006 Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

2007 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography

2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work

2007 Stonewall Book Award's Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award

Annotation: An autobiography told through literary symbolism and detailed illustrations; Fun Home tells the story of how Bechdel came to terms with her father's death, her own sexuality, and life in general.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel 

Jarring, painful, and simultaneously distant and intimate, Bechdel’s illustrated journal is an emotional tour-de-force.  Her true, dramatic, coming of age story reads like a salacious novel. Fun Home is hard to put down. Alison and her younger brothers split their childhood between helping their father renovate his precious, historical house and helping him maintain the family’s funeral home business (the “Fun Home” of the title).  Despite the amount of time spent with together, her father’s massive, crushing secrets do not begin to reveal themselves until she nears adulthood. The powerful discoveries of her sexual, emotional, and intellectual self are eclipsed by the newly discovered realities of her family’s history. Like a frantic personal narrative, Fun Home jumps back and forth through Bechdel’s life. Despite the lack of chronology, the story flows easily from event to event. The format, dialogue, and artwork make Fun Home a captivating, fast-paced read. However, the frequent allusions to ancient texts as well as classic European and American literature distance the reader from the narThisrator’s experience. The frank, straight-forward discussion of death, homosexuality, and intercourse make Fun Home an item to be recommended only to mature readers. Similarly, the realistic approach to these difficult topics and the respect paid through illustration to the human body makes this book ideal for mature teenagers and adults interested in a gripping discussion on sexuality, coming-of-age, and what it means to be a family.

This is super cool! 

Watch how Alison creates her illustrations!

Praise for Fun Home

"Hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best . . . [A] story that's quiet, dignified, and not easy to put down." —Publishers Weekly, starred review 

"Bechdel's memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance, and psychological complexity . . . Though this will likely be stocked with graphic novels, it shares as much in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review 

"Stupendous. Alison Bechdel's mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection is a rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature. The details — visual and verbal, emotional and elusive — are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." — Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys 

"Brave and forthright and insightful — exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." — Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina 

"The only cartoonist I know of to match [Garry] Trudeau's achievement is the brilliant Alison Bechdel." — Chris Ekman, political cartoonist