About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Emily Carrington
Rave New City Lit I loved the book. Carrington is a terrific storyteller, even if her muse is her deep deep pain. I found myself cheering for her, turning page after page of this graphic memoir hoping that it would get better, that she would get justice or revenge or both ... Carrington draws in a style that is spare and descriptive at the same time, while rendering her pages in a black-and-white that befits the graveness of the subject matter. And her writing deftly blends exposition and introspection in the tradition of the best graphic novelists. (Though few have such serious subjects to confront.) I hope she’s found the catharsis she needs in the making of this book, and that in doing so, she’ll be free to write another book. I really want to see her find happiness.
Mannie Murphy
Rave New City Lit Murphy’s book is an unrelenting litany of such horrors; I don’t think they say anything positive about their hometown ... they are entitled to their perspective, and they indict the political establishment as well as the arts underground—especially Van Sant—in a despair-filled cycle of drugs, racism and death ... The book’s visual style—a diary written in cursive on schoolchildren’s lined paper with images illustrated in wet blue ink washes—is stunning and just spot-on in conveying the gloomy menace of Murphy’s world. Though they won’t be feted by the local chamber of commerce, this is the work of an important new voice in the graphic storytelling medium.
Guy Delisle
Rave New City Lit Delisle remembers the particulars of the work he did, even decades removed, but really shines in depicting the emotional beats of a first job as a teenager, the exaggerated nervousness about making mistakes, the intrigues of having peer relationships with coworkers who, unlike your schoolmates, are not your age nor on a career path of any sort ... His handful of encounters with his father are insightful and moving; early on, his cartoonist eye moves away from his dad’s talking mouth and zeroes in on his footwear—sandals with socks, the universal symbol of filial embarrassment ... Delisle’s drawing style might be described as a classical approach to contemporary cartooning, but he occasionally flourishes us with gorgeous renditions of the factory and its architecture. Most intriguing, though, is his experiment in color, which he’s done in other books ... This book moved me.
Michel Rabagliati, Trans. by Helge Dascher
Positive Newcity Lit ... emotional recognition was a recurring theme for me while reading this ... The themes of a fiftysomething cartoonist going through layers of loss...seemed perversely compelling to this fiftysomething writer ... Rabagliati’s work paints life in all its shades of sadness, small moment by small moment, until the cumulative sorrow seems ready to burst. Paul at Home is a melancholy poem about the inevitable loss that life is; those small triggering memories that we accumulate and cherish and that crush us at the same time.
Adrian Tomine
Positive New City Lit ...a quick read, a series of amusing experiential trifles, until an existential gut-punch is delivered to Tomine in the final piece ... This book is rendered in black-and-white on blue-lined graph paper, which works to reinforce the artist’s-journal conceit, as does the physical format of a journal itself. Tomine is a master colorist, though, and I miss the warmth of his palette, even as my brain tells me how well these stories are working without it.
Sarah Braunstein
Positive New City Lit At more than 350 pages, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children is a substantial debut novel, but movement is fierce and swift. The division of the novel into six parts (each signifying a leap in time), and these parts into chapters, speeds things along. Braunstein’s writing is richly poetic, bringing to mind the prose of Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout. Objects and people are often portrayed in a state of disintegration, of collapse ... There are times when Braunstein is guilty of over-writing ... The only other notable weakness is the novel’s lack of setting ... This is a novel you won’t want to put down. These are characters you won’t want to stop rooting for.