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3.26 AVERAGE
3.26 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
It's less of a narrative and more of a meditation on permanence and mortality. The artwork is beautiful, and her thoughts offer some insight into my own attraction to ruined buildings, old photographs, family stories. Does it matter that I was here? Can it, even? Not questions that can be definitively answered in a book, obviously, but I enjoyed her contemplation.
An interesting take on finding yourself. I enjoyed the phrase "ruin porn" but also how she gave context to and thought of the random events thrown at us in life.
I really loved this graphic memoir. One of the things that I loved about it was that, even though I finished it hours ago, I am definitely still processing what it meant to me, and for me.
I loved the artwork in the book. It was sparse but powerful, and I think the choice to use black and white only really enhanced the meaning and the power of the images and words. I also loved the way Radtke interspersed actual photographs into some of the images, blending her artwork with the real world she's talking about. I thought those cells were particularly powerful, both in the mixed media as well as in her CHOICES regarding when to mix that media.
Ultimately, this story is about a life in transition. Radtke dealing with the loss of someone she loved very much at the same time that she was trying to figure out who she was and what she wanted out of life clearly impacted her in ways that it seemed she obviously didn't understand at the time. There were layers of stories -- her uncle, her 20s, her career, her wanderlust, her obsession with ruins -- and it was all interweaved so beautifully. She didn't shove things in the reader's face, but rather transitioned from one thing into the other and back again in a way that sometimes came off as disjointed as she surely felt. I loved watching her journey, as painful as it sometimes (often?) was, because it felt so true -- the obsession over one thing because you think it might give you answers or make you feel more secure when nothing else makes sense.
The ending was particularly powerful -- it broke things down to the most basic of truths, which can either serve as a comfort and/or a powerful reminder of how small we are in the great big world around us.
I loved the artwork in the book. It was sparse but powerful, and I think the choice to use black and white only really enhanced the meaning and the power of the images and words. I also loved the way Radtke interspersed actual photographs into some of the images, blending her artwork with the real world she's talking about. I thought those cells were particularly powerful, both in the mixed media as well as in her CHOICES regarding when to mix that media.
Ultimately, this story is about a life in transition. Radtke dealing with the loss of someone she loved very much at the same time that she was trying to figure out who she was and what she wanted out of life clearly impacted her in ways that it seemed she obviously didn't understand at the time. There were layers of stories -- her uncle, her 20s, her career, her wanderlust, her obsession with ruins -- and it was all interweaved so beautifully. She didn't shove things in the reader's face, but rather transitioned from one thing into the other and back again in a way that sometimes came off as disjointed as she surely felt. I loved watching her journey, as painful as it sometimes (often?) was, because it felt so true -- the obsession over one thing because you think it might give you answers or make you feel more secure when nothing else makes sense.
The ending was particularly powerful -- it broke things down to the most basic of truths, which can either serve as a comfort and/or a powerful reminder of how small we are in the great big world around us.
This graphic was beautiful, haunting and relate able. I loved the illustrations and how the book was broken up chapter to chapter.
Radtke's writing is beautiful and the imagery works in concert with the story. She provides interesting subject matters that remain loosely tied together in how they relate to one another. This is one of the challenges (and maybe positive interventions) of the text. However, this book is receiving polarizing reviews because of Radtke's silence on the relationship of her positional privilege as a white, cis,(presumably) hetero-woman of a certain class whose meditation on loss, decay, and ruin fail to provide a complex understanding beyond her sad emotional state about it. In our contemporary moment, this lack of introspection is fodder for how our social and economic systems reward entitled, rich, white young people as in, they get to make art, have pathways to prestigious scholarly environments and ultimately get their work published and monetized. I guess the question for us as the reader and Radtke as the author/illustrator is whose responsibility is it to connect these dots? I for one, wish she could have included this in the text alongside what she does provide, though as it's presented it is an illumination of how white femininity operates through the realm of entitlement to property, peoples' memories, and places that is in its own way a marvel to behold.
I had high expectations for this one and it wasn't quite what I thought it'd be. Overall it's good, but not the amazing book I thought I was getting.
I'm not sure where to begin. I think a fellow Goodreads user captures a lot of my feelings in the first line of their review: "A depressed young white woman moves from location to location and picks up local culture--sometimes literally stealing it, sometimes wandering through as an ill-equipped, uninformed tourist." I also felt like I was reading "a self-absorbed, joyless tomb raid" (literally. The author's theft of items from Seth Thomas' memorial, plus her repeated invocation of his memory based on nothing except a newspaper article and a lot of projection, is unsettling and disrespectful). The only things I'll add are that images read a lot like clip art, and the way the author describes the history of devastated places fails to give any proper acknowledgment of how colonialism, gentrification, and other dynamics of social injustice contribute to the ruins she... explores? hijacks? renders without so much of a passing nod to the genocide that some of these places hold the violence of? If you're looking for illustrated treatments of grief, loss, and depression, there are others out there with far more self-reflection, and less of the imperialism of white woman tourism.
The death of the author's youngest uncle propels her to explore ruins.
It's not good. She goes on these ruminations about what we've done or how we react or search for the past. I don't relate to it at all. The first place she explores is Gary, Indiana. It's not abandoned, but much like Detroit and the other ruins she talks about, it's more about the absence of white people. Gary, Indiana has a black population over 80%. White people left in the 1960s as steel industry declined and now young white people, like the author, explore it as if it's devoid of human life for hundreds of years. That kept me on the outside of this book. Also, in Gary she takes some photos from an empty church and it turns out to belong to a memorial of an artsy young man like herself. She makes this theft about herself and never attempts to return it anyone.
I couldn't help but think of how this book centered a white American perspective without interrogating it, like the ruins and death of Southeast Asia but no discussion of America's involvement in the area since World War 2. The only time she explores how these ruins are man-made is the chapter on the Peshtigo fire and how it connected to how during World War 2 American forces used what they knew to study incendiary devices and chemicals and how it led to firebombing Dresden and Tokyo and napalm. It's only when she looks at abandoned mining towns in Colorado and talk with people that left that she finds now mystery or romanticism, but people that had poisoned their own hometown with arsenic and lead. In the final chapter, she talk about how we fantasize about disaster, but who is this we she is talking about because I didn't agree with her narrative.
Also, the art is simple black and white computer-generated rotoscope-like. It forces you to pay attention to small details because otherwise it could blend together. I feel that it is cold and distances me from the memoir as a reader.
It's not good. She goes on these ruminations about what we've done or how we react or search for the past. I don't relate to it at all. The first place she explores is Gary, Indiana. It's not abandoned, but much like Detroit and the other ruins she talks about, it's more about the absence of white people. Gary, Indiana has a black population over 80%. White people left in the 1960s as steel industry declined and now young white people, like the author, explore it as if it's devoid of human life for hundreds of years. That kept me on the outside of this book. Also, in Gary she takes some photos from an empty church and it turns out to belong to a memorial of an artsy young man like herself. She makes this theft about herself and never attempts to return it anyone.
I couldn't help but think of how this book centered a white American perspective without interrogating it, like the ruins and death of Southeast Asia but no discussion of America's involvement in the area since World War 2. The only time she explores how these ruins are man-made is the chapter on the Peshtigo fire and how it connected to how during World War 2 American forces used what they knew to study incendiary devices and chemicals and how it led to firebombing Dresden and Tokyo and napalm. It's only when she looks at abandoned mining towns in Colorado and talk with people that left that she finds now mystery or romanticism, but people that had poisoned their own hometown with arsenic and lead. In the final chapter, she talk about how we fantasize about disaster, but who is this we she is talking about because I didn't agree with her narrative.
Also, the art is simple black and white computer-generated rotoscope-like. It forces you to pay attention to small details because otherwise it could blend together. I feel that it is cold and distances me from the memoir as a reader.