More graphic novel goodness. As I get sleepier and lazier in my reading habits (let’s just say that my attempts at Finnegan’s Wake are taking up my intelligent reading brain cells), I am turning more and more to graphic novels. They are quick to read, they aren’t text heavy, and generally, even the ones dealing with serious issues aren’t physically or mentally heavy. Siberiak is only 118 pages in length, and with simpler pictures than my last graphic novel read, so a perfect quick read before bed.
Siberiak is a lightly affecting read about a group of Americans who go on a peace tour (exchange? I’m not really quite sure what to call it) in Soviet Russia in 1988. It’s a memoir and the main character is a girl named Jenny, who is a bit shy, a bit silly, a bit funny, maybe one could say a bit like me. Going to Soviet Russia seems like the sort of thing I would have done (barring the fact that I was nine when the Soviet Union collapsed). There are bits of Russian, in Cyrillic, speckled throughout the comic, basic stuff (please, thank you, etc.) and I was pleased with how much I remembered from my very basic course in Russian from university (я очень люблю русский язык!)
It’s a sweet book, in the same way a kitten or a bunny rabbit is sweet. Not much happens. Jenny goes around on the tour, meets some Russians, goes home. There’s no real emotional depth to any of her encounters, there’s no real conflict (other than a brief squabble near the end about feet on tables and empty chocolate bar wrappers). She passes up a chance to visit Томск-7 (or maybe she did go and just had enough sense not to write about it). While there is a lot of and this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, because the book is short and because you can sense the innocence of these teenagers in these encounters, the story ends before one can get too annoyed. There’s an epilogue, brief, only two pages, that might have benefited from some more self-reflection on the experience. As Jaeckel writes at the end:
Did we change the world? Sure we did. A little.
I would have liked to see a bit more how the world was changed.
As for style, Siberiak is drawn much like Maus with characters represented by animals. Americans are bunnies and the Russians are cats? Voles? Hares? I’m not quite sure. They have pointy rather than floppy ears. The pictures are simplistic and black and white only. The lettering strained my eyes. I got a proof copy to read, so maybe once published the lettering will be cleared up, but half the time I was squinting to see what the words said. Both the drawing and the lettering could have been cleaned up some, but I think the point for this graphic novel is the story and less the artwork; the artwork is just along for the ride, almost like padding to flesh the story out.
In any case, Jenny Jaeckel had an adventure and I learned that bicycle in Russian is велосипед, transliterated, velociped, which is pretty awesome.
Siberiak: My Cold War Adventure on the River Ob by Jenny Jaeckel went on sale October 15, 2014.
I received a copy free in a librarything giveway in exchange for an honest review.