Review by thespicelessreader - It Rhymes With Takei

thespicelessreader 's review for:

It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei

4.0

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

A moving memoir from George Takei chronicling his experience growing up as a closeted Japanese-American gay man in America in the 1950s through to modern day. He sheds much needed light on what it meant to navigate family, career and politics as someone who wasn't allowed to fully embrace who they really were publicly in a time where society was vocally and physically violent to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. I appreciated him not shying away from the consequences that the intersectionality of his race and his orientation had on him.
The art style was wonderful and did a perfect job of capturing Takei's iconic facial expressions and mannerisms without making him a caricature of himself. It was also easy to identify other famous faces even before they were specifically named.

I do feel that the story itself suffered in the last 50-75 page as we moved further away from George's story in particular and more generally into the American political climate of the past couple of decades. This is obviously super important context and history to gay rights and equality, but divorced of Takei's experience the whole section felt very text heavy and contained a lot of info dumping rather than story telling like we had in the rest of the graphic novel.

I think this would be a great graphic novel for any library to keep on hand for early teen readers and older. If read with a parent to help give context around some of the authors self professed riskier activities

(re: the bath house and the language used in that scene)

I feel it could also be appropriate for some pre-teen audiences.

Content Warnings