Reviews tagging 'Car accident'

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

65 reviews

jmarob's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.0


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rhubarbpi3's review

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funny lighthearted reflective fast-paced

4.5

I quite liked this! I thought it would be way more sad like the play (which I haven't seen but have listened to and heard a ton about) but I didn't find this very sad at all? She talks a lot about her longing for a relationship with her father, but not that she's sad she didn't have a good one... very interesting and I loved all the literary references/extended metaphors all the way through, this is the first graphic novel I've ever read to have done that. The word choice was interesting? I didn't dislike it, but there were more words I had to google than any other book I've read this year, which was interesting to pair with the perceived reading level of a story in pictures and words. 

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grem_ler's review

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challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

3.75


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joensign's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0


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blackberryjambaby's review

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emotional informative mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

4.0


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gussurireads's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny medium-paced

5.0

I was drawn to this because Bechdel is famous for, well, the Bechdel test, and as a queer woman who loves stories centered on women and their relationships with other women, that test is very important to me.

So I went in completely blind. Mind you, I am fan of graphic novels. I don't read a lot of memoirs, though. But Alison Bechdel writes and draws a compelling, honest and yes, at times pretentious, story of her bizarre family, drawing parallels between herself, an out and proud lesbian, to her closeted, deeply repressed father.

It's not the kind of graphic novel that you breeze through in a couple of hours. It took me a few days of carefully going through this and still there's so many references that eluded me, what with me not being an English major or a very cultured reader (I enjoy my fantasy, ok?)

Still, so much of Allison's story resonated with me, as most queer stories do. The act of discovering a new part of ourselves, coming to terms with it, rejoicing in this newfound identity, is quite possible the most universal queer experience of them all, and Bechdel is a master at embellishing her own experience. Like father, like daughter, indeed. 

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jamieruwen's review

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emotional funny reflective medium-paced

5.0

I mean, you don't need to tell me you that Fun Home is an outstanding piece of literature. It's a remarkable comic-memoir, a coming of age as much as it is a grief novel as much as it is a reconciliation with the father Alison Bechdel knew as a child and the man he turned out to be, as it is a reconciliation of her self with her father's self. Some panels nearly moved me to tears because they were so brilliantly composed (Alison and her father standing in front of the mirror before the wedding!). This might become one of those books that I'll reread every year, it's probably  one of those where you find something new in it every time you read it. 

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becksusername's review

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emotional reflective fast-paced

4.0


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haileyhardcover's review

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced
I don’t know how to rate this book, so I simply will not. Did I enjoy reading it? No, not particularly. It is awkward, painful, and unnecessarily sesquipedalian. Is it also incredible? Undoubtedly, yes. 

The amount of TIME that must’ve gone into writing - or more specifically DRAWING - all of this is mind blowing. With a cursory glance, one might look at Bechdel’s artistic style and think it unoriginal - similar to so many other comics we’ve seen before. But I beg you to look longer. Look at the detail; not in EVERY panel, but so many of them. Look at all of the WORDS. There are so many words - beyond the captions and the speech/thought ballons, so often the art of the panels themselves are just words - snippets from letters, journals, books, newspapers, court records, or the dictionary… and it’s all hand drawn?! I can’t begin to imagine how much time this would take… 

Fun Home is not fun. I cannot say I enjoyed reading it, but I also absolutely cannot deny that it’s a masterpiece. I have no idea how they could’ve turned this into a musical… 

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avidales's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0


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