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4.61 AVERAGE
4.61 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
fast-paced
fast-paced
This is my first original graphic novel, and I’m so glad I started here! I can’t imagine a more powerful medium through which to tell this story. The illustrations were small, quick sketches. Nothing fancy, but full of significance - the way the characters were easily differentiated by the kind of animal they were, the real photographs included, even the misspelling or improper grammar written verbatim as his dad spoke it. Gruesome, terrifying, and almost too incredible to believe - and yet told in such a nonchalant way, truly just a conversation between a father and his son. It honestly explored tensions in their relationship, and their conversations felt like a needed break in the horrible story of the Holocaust. It was also so interesting to see the author processing his father’s story almost alongside us as the reader. You could also tell the author cared about making everything as accurate as possible and heavily researched. I feel simply blown away by this story and have a feeling it will stay with me for many years to come.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
dark
emotional
hopeful
sad
tense
fast-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Disturbing yet honest. Keeps things incredibly personal while also educating you. I also like that both the narrator and the person whose memoir he is dictating are incredibly calm and collected. It's objective, relatively emotionless, and still disturbing. I also like that at the beginning of the second part, the author analyzes his work in the 3rd person. It displayed his incredible intelligence and helped me read more into his work. This is a definite classic, be sure to pick it up.
dark
emotional
medium-paced
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Vladek's Holocaust experience was no less devastating given that the characters were portrayed as animals. It is amazing how much humans can endure and the variety of coping strategies we use to survive trauma. Yet, even knowing why someone behaves the way they do doesn't make it easier to live with their foibles as a family member. Nor can anyone really understand their lived Holocaust experience. Hearing and reading their stories is not easy but necessary to hopefully prevent anything like it from happening again.
I really love comics as a medium for exploring historical and current events. Especially for an event as traumatic and grotesque as the holocaust- this medium is perfect because it would be excruciating to use real images for those types scenes. The tension between Art and Vladeck is very heartbreaking. Throughout the whole book, I thought a lot about what it must feel like to survive all of that and then to be as alone as Vladeck was. Or the constant guilt and depression Art must feel about his strained relationship with his father. I’m really glad with the book ending at the moment that Vladeck and Anja reunited- it was sort of a happy ending even through we know that things aren’t really happy for Vladeck or Art at the real time that they were recording. I really liked the book because I loved Art and his father’s gritty realism about the war and about their current relationship status.