Scott Semegran
Maus by Art Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about Art Spiegelman's relationship with his father, Vladek, who was a Holocaust survivor along with Spiegelman's mother, Anja. The book description from the publisher describes it best: “A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.”
I reread this brilliant graphic novel for the fourth time recently, having purchased a beautiful, hardcover edition in support of Art Spiegelman after a school board in Tennessee voted unanimously in January 2022 to ban this great book. Their reasons were nonsense, as the nudity in the book is nonsexual and the profanity is minimal. This graphic novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the only graphic novel still to this day to have won this prestigious award. It is an affecting depiction of Art Spiegelman's parents both surviving the Holocaust during World War II as well as Spiegelman's relationship with his cantankerous father as he tries to dictate his father's story before he's too old and feeble to retell it. It is an artist's memoir and a father's biography about a marriage that survived one of the most horrific moments in history and a cartoon depiction of history all rolled into one. It even has moments of hilarity—if you can believe it—where Art and his father Vladek's personality differences are so stark that it's a wonder that Spiegelman ever finished creating this graphic novel. It has been on school library shelves since 1992. Banning it now is political garbage policy, a reflection of the fascist leanings of the current Republican Party. The news of banning this book has brought more notoriety and sales for this graphic novel; it became a bestseller for the first time in almost three decades and was on back-order the day I purchased it on January 30, 2022, as it should be. If there is one graphic novel or book about the Holocaust that you want on your family's bookshelf, then this is the one.
I really enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it. I would give this book 5 stars.
Fantastic! King's love for writing really shines through. I wish I could hang out with him and discuss.
The Bottoms is an Edgar award-winning novel that is told in first-person by Harry Collins, an old man in a rest home, that reflects on his time as a boy in the 1930s, when he and his younger sister discover the corpse of a prostitute in the forest near their home. This discovery sets off a string of events where Harry's father Jacob, the local constable, investigates a string of similar murders and the racist underbelly of the community of Marvel Creek, Texas comes to light. This novel is like a cross between Where the Red Fern Grows and To Kill a Mockingbird with a serial killer thrown into the mix.
The story has an interesting mix of nostalgia and horror as Harry reflects on his youth in the rural community, a place that is beautifully simple as well as horrific in equal measure. Lansdale does an excellent balancing act, showing the good from the ones in the community fighting for racial equality and the bad from the ones who are part of the KKK or simply intolerant to the Black community nearby. Turns out, many in the White community are actually biracial, whether they know it or not, and this bit of secrecy lurks underneath their community; it's like a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered. Even members of the KKK are either unknowingly biracial or in one case, a Jew. It's a telling reality that the town has a difficult time facing. But, in addition to all of this, there is a serial killer stalking women, and leaving their defiled corpses along the river. Harry's father Jacob, the noble constable of Marvel Creek, does his best to investigate the murders. When a Black man named Old Mose is hung by the KKK for the murders, Jacob is consumed with grief and alcohol for Mose's unjustified killing. Only when Harry's grandmother arrives do the clues left by the killer get a more thorough examination, leading us to the truth.
Harry is a very effective storyteller and his memory of the time is sharp, effusive, and empathetic. If there is a stumbling block at all—and it is a minor quibble to be sure—it is the soliloquy the killer eventually gives for his motives, a page taken straight out of a comic book, like a super villain sermonizing about their thwarted plans to the feeble-minded interlopers. Could this killer's motivations and reasons have been conveyed in another way? Possibly. Ultimately, it's a trope of the pulp, murder mystery variety, one that brings the reader out of the literary excellence of the storytelling for a brief moment. Otherwise, this is an excellent novel filled with many treasures worthy of revisiting a second time, if not more.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 4 and 1/2 stars.
Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists who use their young children—who they refer to as Child A and Child B—as unwitting accomplices in their staged spectacles. Or are the children really unwitting? The children, Annie and Buster, grow up to be an actor and an author respectively, and we quickly learn both are happy to have flown the coop. But when Buster suffers a horrifying accident while on a writing assignment, Annie and Buster find themselves back at their family home. They resist the artistic pull of their parents' schemes. But when their parents mysteriously disappear, Child A and Child B have to finally wrestle with their emotions and their past.
This is the second novel of Kevin Wilson's I have read, the more recent Nothing to See Here being the other. Both novels put family dynamics on display, although The Family Fang is told in third person rather than first person, pushing the Fang dynamics into more removed, observational territory. And what humorous specimens to observe! Flashbacks are revealed in most chapters to Annie and Buster's childhood when the Fang's high jinxes had the most impact, retelling staged robberies and plays with faux incest, even the earliest event where a young Annie's screams at a Santa mall event causes a ruckus—the initial inspiration for later renegade performances at shopping malls.
The present timeline and the flashbacks reveal the love/hate dynamic the kids have toward their parents—sometimes they despise being a part of the schemes, other times their wayward behavior elicits love and respect from their parents. Their parents' gravitational pull is too strong for them to stay away for too long. But when their parents mysteriously disappear, the kids wonder if they're dead or if it's another performance piece; it wouldn't be too farfetched, they surmise to everyone. The Fang story is funny and touching and strange, creating a unique world that is truly special. It's hard not to cheer for Annie and Buster, unwitting accomplices to their parents' devotion to art, as they are truly talented in their own right, simply living in the shadow of their parents' notoriety.
Wilson's writing is a marvel of economy and wit, paced with dry perfection, funny and endearing in equal measure. My only quibble being what I'll call run-on paragraphs, where several lines of different characters' dialogue occupy a single paragraph without line breaks, leading to some confusion of who is speaking. But it's a minor quibble. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 5 stars.
