To Drink and To Eat: Treats & Tribulations from a French Kitchen

 

My Thoughts:

This is a comic about food, a visual personal narrative, a cookbook and a book about food. It is all of that and none of that, which makes it interesting. Guillaume Long  is a French artist and gourmand. He runs the blog To Drink and To Eat hosted by LeMonde.fr

I think the variety of shots from the book tells it best:

The recipes for the most part are "gourmet" like oysters with foie gras, but the sardine butter above sounds divine.

From the Publisher:

Hungry for help in the kitchen? Go from basic cook to master chef with Guillaume Long's clever and charming lessons in French food. The third volume of acclaimed French foodie comics by Guillaume Long boasts a full plate of recipes and stories, from perfectly cooked lobster to culinary adventures in Madrid, to the return of Guillaume's forbidden desire for Burger King! Cooking blogs and comics come together in To Drink and To Eat Vol. 3, the newest and most unique cookbook to add to your kitchen shelf.

Parenthesis (Graphic Novel)

 

Publication Date: February 9, 2021

My Thoughts:

I have seen it many times. Writing and drawing is a form of healing and grieving. This story is Èlodie Durand's own catharsis story of healing and grief and loss of herself. Through epileptic seizures brought on by an undiagnosed tumor, changes in personality, loss of freedom, memory, cognitive function, bodily function, vision and balance issues, Durand has lost years of her young life. However, with her drawings and lots of help from her family, she has come out on the other side. She is finally ready to share that she is still here. She continues working on getting back what she has lost. Most importantly, she has declared herself not fully healed, but free just the same. 

For readers who for whatever reason are in the middle of the dark tunnel, unable to see the end light, this book is for you. I felt for her mother who really understands what sacrifice and parenting adults really means. Her bravery is just as large a part of this story as her daughter's illness. 

From the Publisher:

Judith is barely out of her teens when a tumor begins pressing on her brain, ushering in a new world of seizures, memory gaps, and loss of self. Suddenly, the sentence of her normal life has been interrupted by the opening of a parenthesis that may never close.

Based on the real experiences of cartoonist Élodie Durand, Parenthesis is a gripping testament of struggle, fragility, acceptance, and transformation which was deservedly awarded the Revelation Prize of the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

b, Book and Me

 

My thoughts:

I wanted to "tag" this as a minority lit YA book, but it is not. This YA book is translated into English from its original Korean. The south Korean culture, the lived experience of its youth, the environment that these teens are growing up in seems contemporary, however, I am not sure if my shock is just part of my "Americanness." In other words, I felt that this story was so foreign to me and I found that I could not fully "translate" the story. That did not make it bad, just confusing. 

This is the story of poverty and coming of age, bullying and relationships that cannot be judged by American perspectives. I believe that it is my own ignorance that explains why it took so long to finish this. 

From the publisher:

Best friends b and Rang are all each other have. Their parents are absent, their teachers avert their eyes when they walk by. Everyone else in town acts like they live in Seoul even though it's painfully obvious they don’t. When Rang begins to be bullied horribly by the boys in baseball hats, b fends them off. But one day Rang unintentionally tells the whole class about b’s dying sister and how her family is poor, and each of them finds herself desperately alone. The only place they can reclaim themselves, and perhaps each other, is beyond the part of town where lunatics live―the End.

In a piercing, heartbreaking, and astonishingly honest voice, Kim Sagwa’s b, Book, and Me walks the precipice between youth and adulthood, reminding us how perilous the edge can be.