Book Review: Aya of Yop City by Abouet & Oubreri

Aya of Yop City, written by Marguerite Abouet and drawn by Clement Oubrerie, is the sequel to Abouet and Oubrerie's 2007 graphic novel, Aya. It's about a teenage girl named Aya and her group of family and friends set in the 1970s, in the Ivory Coast. It paints a very different picture of life in Africa than we normally get.

Aya's friend Adjoua has just had a baby and she needs help to rear the child. The father—nicknamed the 'Skirtchaser'—is missing and she's set to be married to the lazy son of a wealthy brewery owner. When they discover who the real father is, the wedding is called off and life starts to resume a normal pace. Aya's busy helping Adjoua with the baby while their friend Bintou falls for a rich-looking Parisian.

Life is delightfully normal in Abouet and Oubrerie's Aya of Yip City. The drama in their lives is not unlike the drama we find in our own, and it's a refreshing take on African culture. I would recommend it anyone whose looking for a quick and light read.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Book Review: Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi

The more books I read by Japanese authors, the more I think that I do not possess the level of self-awareness and intellect needed to read Japanese authors.

Introspective, moody and steered primarily through the body language of the characters, Red Colored Elegy is a poetic graphic novel about a couple, Ichiro and Sachiko. Written by Seiichi Hayashi in the seventies, it feels very much like I'm 'reading' a Japanese arthouse film.

It's about love, heartbreak, death, and the mishmash of feelings that every young person struggling with making a living for the first time has to go through. That's pretty much the best way I can sum up this book. Ichiro and Sachiko are a young couple, living in Japan in the seventies, trying to make it as a comic artist and an animator respectively. While it's set in a politically turbulent time in Japan's history, Ichiro and Sachiko skirt around the politics, as they are focused on their own personal struggles.

It's a pretty graphic novel, and it didn't take me long to read at all. Perhaps if I had reflected more on the meaning behind the art it would have taken me longer. I'm really shitty at doing that though, especially if the art is a little more obtuse than I'm used to. It's the same thing that makes me think poetry is boring. Admitting that is probably the most embarrassing thing I can do on a blog, but I make no claims that I'm a genius critic. I likes what I likes.

That being said, I didn't hate Red Colored Elegy. Like I said before, I'm probably just not the sort of person this book is meant to be for.

Rating: Three Stars