The Danes

The premise of this graphic novel may seem fantastical, but the appeal is in the realism of both the pictures and the plot. After all, mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus can infect pregnant women causing their babies to be born with the birth defect microcephaly. The drug Thalidomade, touted to ease morning sickness in pregnant women resulted in more than 10,000 babies worldwide to be born with malformations, bone hypo plasticity and congenital defects before it was pulled off the shelves in the early 1960s.

It is not far fetched, then, to imagine a world where a retrovirus in pregnant women might produce blond, blue eyed babies even when parents are ethnically different. It is also not far fetched to imagine that the outward appearance, rather than the paternity test markers would cause ethnic unrest, disbelief, racism and chaos. Nor is it implausible that the pharmaceutical companies would race to try and create a vaccine for such retrovirus.

This story does a realistic job of imagining such a scenario, clearly playing out the stakeholders and balancing the unrest and corruption with a human story of love and family.

Ironically, I had a job working in South Africa in 2014 and I rented a movie to watch in the B&B called Skin which told the true story of an Afrikaans (Dutch that settled in South Africa) girl born in South Africa in 1955 to two white Afrikaners. Sandra, the daughter looked coloured, or part black but genetically she was the product of these two white parents. How ironic that this true story and this made story are both about the Dutch. To be fair, though, Sandra Laine is a product of a genetic case of atavism, which basically is that a gene from a very distant ancestral traits resurfaces after generations. I feel like Skin predicts the kind of life that Sorraya and Ibraham's baby will go through if this story were also a memoir.