Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Hardship forces people to change. The author walks us along the path of political turbulence in Iran and shows us how different people react when everything around them turns upside down. Some adapt by throwing away their values and becoming more like the ruling power. Others try to fight it and get imprisoned, tortured, exiled, killed. And then there are the survivors who combine adaptation with resistance: the little girl and her parents are among them.
Through the eyes of a little girl it is terrifying to see how kind intelligent loving people have to bend and twist to the destructive whims of the powerful.
For me this was an emotional rollercoaster. Hope, despair, tenderness, rage, love, fear. I kept silently shouting at the show more characters: "Why are you doing this? Don't you see you are hurting others?" show less

Author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran begins in 1980, when she is just ten years old. After the fall of the Shah, her affluent family finds that their privileged, Westernized lifestyle is no longer sustainable. The Ayatollah's standard bearers of Islamic theocracy are in charge, and they are watching everyone for any deviation from acceptable dress, behavior, or attitude. Those who run afoul of the government's dictates risk imprisonment, torture, and even execution.

The chief pleasure of this book is in its illustrations. Satrapi's childlike but incisive drawings effectively capture both the innocence of childhood and the harshness of life under a repressive regime. Her affection for her parents and show more grandmother is particularly evident. In the space of a few pages this book manages to go from funny, to heartbreaking, to tender, and back again, without ever seeming manipulative or forced. I highly recommend this book. show less

Wow, this the only fourth five star review I've given a book this year. Only one of them can be considered a traditional book (Genghis Khan)- one is a collection of postcards and two are graphic novels. But Persepolis deserves it.

This is a coming-of-age book set in the coming-of-age of Iran. How does a child interpret revolutions and wars when ideologies of what's right and wrong change so violently? How does one endure when people disappear at a whim or a random bomb?

She's one of the most endearing children I've met in book form. There are sequels and I early away to find out what happens next.

My third "I better read the damn book before the movie comes out" read in a row. I borrowed this one from the library; a good move, since I read it in one sitting and might have felt cheated had I paid money for it.

Which is not to say it's a bad book, not worth buying. Rather, it's better to read and share than to display on a shelf. The story is by turns tragic, infuriating, funny, bittersweet, hopeful and hopeless. A young girl who lives through the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war? Whose grandparents were princes and prime ministers? How could she -not- have a story to tell?

This is one of those "lest we forget" books that demands to be read by a wider audience. The art, in black and white but very expressive, is excellent and show more the writing is top-notch. Go read it now. show less

This one-of-a-kind graphic novel will make most readers an instant fan of the genre. After all, here is a book that can't (yet) be enjoyed on a Kindle or iPad. The illustrations are simple yet also complex, black-and-white but also colorful-- in these sense that they vividly portray a young girls' childhood and the culture of a grossly misunderstood culture. Marjane Satrapi's voice in this novel is one of a universal adolescent-- only the things that make her feel angst are not the norm. Satrapi grows up around protests, bombings, war, political upheavals. She is opinionated, fiesty, but also very confused and frustrated. While some of the content is quite disturbing, high (and some middle) school students can handle it and will greatly show more benefit from reading this (and probably enjoy it a great deal!). I thoroughly enjoyed this book, both text and illustrations, and truly feel like I know Marjane. This book is more important than ever to read, considering current day prejudices and misconceptions of Arabs and Iranians in the Muslim world. show less

A compelling memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is both a moving portrait of one young girl's life, and a keenly-observed record of the political and religious events unfolding in her country. The author chronicles her family's initial jubilation at the fall of the brutal and corrupt regime of the Shah, their dismay at the growing repressiveness of the new theocracy, and their suffering (along with their countrymen) during the Iran-Iraq War.

Usually indifferent to the charm of comics and graphic-novels, I was all-the-more impressed by Persepolis, which I found both intellectually and visually engaging. Satrapi's seemingly effortless marriage of image and word is a joy to experience, show more and her observations of the world around her sometimes struck a powerful chord in me.

Her belief, as a child, that she would grow up to be one of God's prophets, made me chuckle in self-recognition. Who has not felt the self-evident rightness of their own position, particularly before maturity teaches us that it is possible for more than one belief to be "right?" Her parents' observation at one point, that it was the religious authorities who were the true perverts, reminded me strongly of similar conversations about authority figures on the part of my own parents. It is a mark of her genius that Satrapi's narrative can be so utterly foreign and familiar at the same time. show less

I'm not a fan of graphic novels and I've read more than my fair share about the Iranian revolution, so I was surprised to find myself fully absorbed by this book after reading just a few sentences at Border's. The graphic novel format really fits the child's eye perspective of the book. With short, sharp illustrated anecdotes, we see how unreal and confusing a cultural revolution is for a 10-year-old girl. Little Marjane is surprisingly adorable in her yearning for her father to be arrested and tortured so that she can be the most popular girl in school. Little by little, reality creeps in in the form of executed neighbors and dying relatives. As Marjane comes of age, we see how monstrous the revolution really is but neither she nor her show more family are saints -- just like Americans talking about the war in Iraq, the family switches easily from political discussion to neighborhood gossip. Eighties fads and childhood fights are as much a part of this book as suffering through the reign of the Ayatollah. This made the family easy to relate to, which is probably why the ending moved me so much. I'd recommend this book to anyone, including those who've OD'd on memoirs of Iran or don't usually like graphic novels. show less