Zeina Abirached, author of the award-winning graphic novel A Game for Swallows, returns with a powerful collection of wartime memories.
Abirached was born in Lebanon in 1981. She grew up in Beirut as fighting between Christians and Muslims divided the city streets. Follow her past cars riddled with bullet holes, into taxi cabs that travel where buses refuse to go, and on outings to collect shrapnel from the sidewalk.
With striking black-and-white artwork, Abirached recalls the details of ordinary life inside a war zone.
- (
Baker & Taylor)
Zeina Abirached, author of the award-winning graphic novel A Game for Swallows, returns with a powerful collection of wartime memories.
Abirached was born in Lebanon in 1981. She grew up in Beirut as fighting between Christians and Muslims divided the city streets. Follow her past cars riddled with bullet holes, into taxi cabs that travel where buses refuse to go, and on outings to collect shrapnel from the sidewalk.
With striking black-and-white artwork, Abirached recalls the details of ordinary life inside a war zone.
- (
Lerner Pub Group)
Booklist Reviews
Abirached won numerous accolades for her debut, A Game for Swallows (2012), and this follow-up similarly covers her 1980s experiences in Lebanon in a series of vignettes. Each high-contrast black-and-white illustration is paired with a memory, from the mundane ("I remember giant robot cartoons") to the profound ("I remember seeing roadblocks made from burnt-out city buses"). The blocky, naive-style pictures quietly evoke wartime fears in ways the words simply cannot—bullet holes in the sides of cars, rubble in the streets, her father's eyebrows indicating increasing sadness at the heartbreaking state of a formerly vital market. Perhaps most moving, however, are the illustrations with no words at all—a series of plain black pages followed by subtle black-on-white scratchboard illustrations are not paired with a memory, but the spare style, so different from the rest of the book, speaks volumes. Abirached's childlike memories altogether compose a deeply personal portrait of Beirut unlike any historical account, and for readers curious about conflict in the region, it will provide a useful, humanizing entry point. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.