Shelved at 741.5

Marji at ten, arguing with God about whether she will be the last prophet: that is the panel I still see whenever somebody says the word memoir.

The drawing does something prose can't, and I offer that as somebody who spent decades being sniffy about anything with speech bubbles in it. Everyone is a black shape. Faces are four marks. Because nobody is individuated in the usual way, the crowds and the executions land differently — you are not invited to weep over a beautifully rendered face, you are shown a shape being removed. I had to sit with that.

Vienna is the weaker half. The homelessness section is real and awful and somehow narrower than the war chapters before it; teenage misery is teenage misery, even in a good book.

We had it in 741.5 with a note, and it went out steadily to sixth formers and to precisely one Year 8 girl called Tolu, who returned it in four days and asked what else there was like it. I gave her Maus and she brought that back in three.