Book-It 'o13! Book #9
Feb. 19th, 2013 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alivemagdoleneThe Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: You'll Never Know Book Three: Soldier's Heart by C. Tyler
Details: Copyright 2012, Fantagraphics
Synopsis (By Way of Publisher's Description): "The final volume of the acclaimed, multigenerational graphic memoir.
In one of the most eagerly-anticipated graphic novels of 2012, Soldier’s Heart concludes the story of Carol Tyler and her delving into her father’s war experiences in a way that is both surprising and devastating — and rather than trying to summarize this episode and thus possibly spoil it for readers, we prefer to simply offer a selection of comments on the first two installments of this autobiographical masterpiece.
Publishers Weekly: “(Starred Review) In the first volume of Tyler’s planned trilogy of graphic memoirs, she dug into the eruptive, violent memories of her father’s WWII experiences while simultaneously dealing with a husband who decided to go find himself and leave her with a daughter to raise. [Book Two] is no less rich and overwhelming. Tyler gets back to the business of detailing her father’s war stories — difficult given that he is ‘one of those guys who closed it off and never talked about it’ — as well as coming to terms with her already touchy parents’ increasingly ornery attitudes. Closing the circle somewhat is Tyler’s concern over her daughter’s troubled nature, which seems to mirror her own wild past. While the language of Chicago-raised and Cincinnati-based Tyler has a winningly self-deprecating Midwestern spareness to it, her art is a lavishly prepared kaleidoscope of watercolors and finely etched drawings, all composed to look like the greatest family photo album of all time. The story’s honest self-revelations and humane evocations of family dramas are tremendously moving. Tyler’s book could well leave readers simultaneously eager to see the third volume, but also nervous about the traumas, home front and war front, that it might contain.”
Booklist: “Tyler’s fluid, expressive linework, complemented by subtly overlaid watercolors, gives ideal visual expression to a narrative that’s at once sensitive and hard-nosed... Decades of drawing mostly autobiographical stories have honed her skills, enabling her to produce a work that ranks in quality with the graphic memoirs of Alison Bechdel (Fun Home)and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis).”
Full color throughout"
Why I Wanted to Read It: Having read Book One and Book Two, I was excited to be able to finally finish the series.
How I Liked It: This was a compelling and well executed series from the first book. Tyler blends documenting her father's experiences in the war with attempting to stabilize her own relationship with him in a way that's downright Mausesque. The variety of styles she employs (from realistic to classic cartoony) is impressive and surprisingly not distracting.
This book is easily the best of the three. Tyler clearly has the heart and goes for the sucker-punch when she reveals her father's "secret", which gives her perhaps her truest insight into war itself.
However, you can't help but get the impression that this series would have been so much better as a single book. The second felt stretched at times and given the length of each of the three, it wouldn't be terribly burdensome. The three books aren't so much a series as one book cut up into three pieces. It was clearly and understandably for the ease of the publishers and the author that the books were released the way that they were, particularly the length that went into the production, but they just function so much better as a single entity.
But if it took chopping the story into three books to get the story we did at the level of quality we did, it's more than worthwhile. Tyler's series is an invaluable account not only of World War II or of war in general, but of the human cost of war itself.
Notable: Tyler's absentee husband and the father of her daughter has figured into the books by way of abandoning her and her daughter and generally coming across as a vain, selfish, self-absorbed lout. While the highly personal nature of a memoir is going to cast certain people in an unflattering light, it's rather jarring to learn that Tyler's husband is not only also an artist, but is legendary underground comix artist Justin Green, who appeared in Art Spiegelman's comics anthology magazine in the 1970s. We find this out via Tyler's lamentation that her husband can connect better to their daughter (who is suffering from the effects of OCD) as he shares the same illness and apparently details his struggle in what is generally considered to be the first underground comic memoir and a pioneering work in graphic novels in general, what Tyler deems his "Comix masterpiece", Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.
Title: You'll Never Know Book Three: Soldier's Heart by C. Tyler
Details: Copyright 2012, Fantagraphics
Synopsis (By Way of Publisher's Description): "The final volume of the acclaimed, multigenerational graphic memoir.
In one of the most eagerly-anticipated graphic novels of 2012, Soldier’s Heart concludes the story of Carol Tyler and her delving into her father’s war experiences in a way that is both surprising and devastating — and rather than trying to summarize this episode and thus possibly spoil it for readers, we prefer to simply offer a selection of comments on the first two installments of this autobiographical masterpiece.
Publishers Weekly: “(Starred Review) In the first volume of Tyler’s planned trilogy of graphic memoirs, she dug into the eruptive, violent memories of her father’s WWII experiences while simultaneously dealing with a husband who decided to go find himself and leave her with a daughter to raise. [Book Two] is no less rich and overwhelming. Tyler gets back to the business of detailing her father’s war stories — difficult given that he is ‘one of those guys who closed it off and never talked about it’ — as well as coming to terms with her already touchy parents’ increasingly ornery attitudes. Closing the circle somewhat is Tyler’s concern over her daughter’s troubled nature, which seems to mirror her own wild past. While the language of Chicago-raised and Cincinnati-based Tyler has a winningly self-deprecating Midwestern spareness to it, her art is a lavishly prepared kaleidoscope of watercolors and finely etched drawings, all composed to look like the greatest family photo album of all time. The story’s honest self-revelations and humane evocations of family dramas are tremendously moving. Tyler’s book could well leave readers simultaneously eager to see the third volume, but also nervous about the traumas, home front and war front, that it might contain.”
Booklist: “Tyler’s fluid, expressive linework, complemented by subtly overlaid watercolors, gives ideal visual expression to a narrative that’s at once sensitive and hard-nosed... Decades of drawing mostly autobiographical stories have honed her skills, enabling her to produce a work that ranks in quality with the graphic memoirs of Alison Bechdel (Fun Home)and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis).”
Full color throughout"
Why I Wanted to Read It: Having read Book One and Book Two, I was excited to be able to finally finish the series.
How I Liked It: This was a compelling and well executed series from the first book. Tyler blends documenting her father's experiences in the war with attempting to stabilize her own relationship with him in a way that's downright Mausesque. The variety of styles she employs (from realistic to classic cartoony) is impressive and surprisingly not distracting.
This book is easily the best of the three. Tyler clearly has the heart and goes for the sucker-punch when she reveals her father's "secret", which gives her perhaps her truest insight into war itself.
However, you can't help but get the impression that this series would have been so much better as a single book. The second felt stretched at times and given the length of each of the three, it wouldn't be terribly burdensome. The three books aren't so much a series as one book cut up into three pieces. It was clearly and understandably for the ease of the publishers and the author that the books were released the way that they were, particularly the length that went into the production, but they just function so much better as a single entity.
But if it took chopping the story into three books to get the story we did at the level of quality we did, it's more than worthwhile. Tyler's series is an invaluable account not only of World War II or of war in general, but of the human cost of war itself.
Notable: Tyler's absentee husband and the father of her daughter has figured into the books by way of abandoning her and her daughter and generally coming across as a vain, selfish, self-absorbed lout. While the highly personal nature of a memoir is going to cast certain people in an unflattering light, it's rather jarring to learn that Tyler's husband is not only also an artist, but is legendary underground comix artist Justin Green, who appeared in Art Spiegelman's comics anthology magazine in the 1970s. We find this out via Tyler's lamentation that her husband can connect better to their daughter (who is suffering from the effects of OCD) as he shares the same illness and apparently details his struggle in what is generally considered to be the first underground comic memoir and a pioneering work in graphic novels in general, what Tyler deems his "Comix masterpiece", Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.
