by Soph Myers-Kelley Bishakh Som in Spellbound introduces the reader to a memoir experience about culture, immigration, queerness, transness, tantalizing foods, and crushing identity crises. It’s ideal for older teenagers and adults. One of the most interesting creative decisions Som makes in her book is the choice to use a stand-in cisgender Bengali American character named Anjali instead of depicting her own likeness as the protagonist. Som herself is a transgender Bengali American woman, who came out as an adult. She originally created this work as a diary comic before stringing together longer chapters. This book is a complex, note… Read More
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) chronicles the events of Bechdel’s childhood in the early 1970’s and her entry into adulthood and homosexuality at university. Her father was a repressed, unhappy aesthete, trapped in family life in his home town in rural Pennsylvania, running the family funeral home and teaching at the local school to make ends meet. He was a closet gay who had affairs with young men an ended up in court for plying teenage boys with alcohol. His death, most probably a suicide, haunts the book, an “extended meditation on history, memory, identity and trauma”… Read More