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Loading... Fun Home: A Family Tragicomicby Alison Bechdel
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» 59 more Female Author (85) Top Five Books of 2013 (239) Favourite Books (619) Books Read in 2014 (151) Top Five Books of 2014 (511) Books Read in 2020 (314) 100 New Classics (43) Female Protagonist (257) Top Five Books of 2016 (642) Best family sagas (125) Best Family Stories (146) Read This Next (14) Books Read in 2015 (1,492) Books Read in 2019 (1,567) 2000s decade (47) Overdue Podcast (272) Books Read in 2022 (3,981) Biggest Disappointments (106) One Book, Many Authors (401) Books Read in 2006 (157) Unshelved Book Clubs (49) Swinging Seventies (75) Reading 2008 (4) Five star books (1,392) Pride Wishlist (52) No current Talk conversations about this book. I tried and I tried to make myself like this. But it was SO complicated. So many literary citations that made me feel utterly dumb. Oh well, I guess I better stick to simpler stuff. Great art tho! You can read this over and over again and get something new out of it every time. And I'm sure I'm missing loads. A real work of literature, in comic form. Fuckin' genius. I finally read this after years of everyone yelling at me because even my damn therapist said I should. (Un?)Fortunately related to the weird closeted gay dad thing, which was comforting to know existed in some sort of media and am really here for more of, but could not relate to the majority for obvious reasons of not being a lesbian or attracted primarily to women for the time being. It's my own ill but I genuinely enjoyed and would recommend it. Warning for young or religious readers: this is pornographic (i.e. it portrays sex and nudity). That said, it also has a lot to say about about death and relationships that is interesting and worth reading.
Bechdel’s style is straightforward. Her detailed drawings strive to present what she remembers accurately and with detail. The book is black-and-white with a blue-grey watercolor wash that provides depth and adds to the feeling of memory.
This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home, ' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found.
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)741.5973The arts Graphic arts and decorative arts Drawing & drawings Cartoons, Caricatures, Comics Collections North American United States (General)LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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One of the most difficult things to do in any form is to make narrative seem casual to the point of aimlessness, but then have everything resolve so tightly that it's impossible to believe it ever felt airy. Fun Home works as a de- and re-construction of memory as it does coming-of-age (and coming out) story, and the artistry of the drawings, not perfectly realistic, but with more precision than in an average graphic novel, heightens the mimetic effect.
Just really brilliant, and that is not a phrase I toss around lightly. (