Poppies of Iraq

Despite many good vignettes and anecdotes, this autobiography is too random and unstructured for me, skipping around through the upbringing of the co-author in Iraq and France. The intermittent inclusion of real family photos drove home the impression I had of sitting on the sofa in a stranger's house as she flips through pages of a family scrapbook telling occasionally humorous stories about a bunch of people I don't really know. While it isn't painful, I'm mostly going to nod politely until I can find an opportunity to leave.

I found this book a little confusing at first because it jumps around a lot, but you also have to remember that this is how we have memories. If you read a memoir that is in chronological order, it's because the author took a bunch of messed up memories and constructed them that way. Taken together, the vignettes do add up to a fascinating portrait of life in Iraq.

This is an interesting, sometimes funny and sometimes sad, look at life in Iraq from a unique perspective. The author, Brigitte Findakly, is the daughter of an Iraqi, Orthodox Christian father and a French, Catholic mother. The family lived in Iraq in the 60s and 70s while Findakly was a child. Eventually, with worsening conditions in Iraq, the family moved to France. It was definitely worth the read!

I like this in theory, but in the classic creative writing idiom of "show, don't tell," it mostly felt like a lot of telling and little showing. Each episode seemed like it could contain a book in itself. I would revisit Findakly if other work offered more in depth insights.

This book is author Brigitte Findakly's memories of her family and her homeland Iraq, illustrated by her talented husband, the acclaimed cartoonist Lewis Trondheim. Sadly, the book is disappointing: the narrative is very disjointed, jumping around between actual historical events in Iraq, her family's struggles with its social, military, and economic standing, and a myriad of cultural and religious issues, especially challenging for Christians in an Islamic state. I would have liked a little more attention paid to Findakly's family photographs, which could have been clearer and would have benefited from some labels.

A graphic novel memoir of growing up in Iraq during the last twenty years. Nothing amazing, but very informational. The drawings though, are superb. Simple but detailed enough for easy understanding.

This 2017 book written by Brigitte Findakly and illustrated by her husband Lewis Trondheim is a memoir of Findakly's life growing up in Iraq. Findakly had a better than average life in Iraq as her father was a dentist and they could afford private schools and vacations in France where her mother emigrated to Iraq from. The family was unique because they were Orthodox Christians in a Muslim country.

With her father being asked to pay excessive taxes that he could not afford to pay, he decided to leave Iraq for France. His cover story for the government whom he worked for was that he needed training on how to do dental implants. The training was approved and the family left with no intention of returning until things improved in Iraq. I show more believe the author was about 18 years old at this time. However, this was 1979. The Iran-Iraq War followed from 1980-1989, the Gulf War in 1990 and the second Gulf War in 2003. Her father never expected his exile to be that long.

The family was not political unless they had to be and when her father could no longer support Saddam Hussein's government, he willingly gave up his government pension and all hope of ever returning to Iraq. The author, however, made several trips back over the years to visit relatives and saw their homes and possessions and dreams becoming more and more shattered. Eventually they all left by 2016, their homeland no longer recognizable.

While the family did not suffer much religious prejudice while the author lived there, as Saddam Hussein's government took hold her cousins suffered persecution and developed Islamapobia. It seems to me that the author's mother kept her indoors at certain times so perhaps there was some prejudice happening to them that the mother shielded her from.

Poppies in Iraq is an informative graphic memoir on life in Iraq from 1950 to the present time. The title of the book comes from an archeological site in Nimrod where the author used to play as a child. Poppies were prevalent there. show less