I Remember Beirut

September 1, 2014
As with Abirached’s debut, A Game for Swallows, this b&w graphic memoir of growing up in Lebanon during that country’s civil war invites comparison to Persepolis. Collecting memories introduced via the recurring phrase “I remember,” Abirached’s prose and artwork convey, with grace and humor, the way her family’s life during the war shifted from mundane to ominous and back again. Her mother tired of getting her windshield replaced every time a shell hit, and she eventually drove without it. There was no water for showers, but an endless supply of cigarettes. Abirached’s younger brother assembled a collection of shrapnel, and the author recalls watching the Olympics (“I remember Florence Griffith Joyner’s nails”). When an attack forced Abirached, her schoolmates, and teachers to stay at school overnight, she realized that “our teachers were as scared as we were.” In the middle of her account, Abirached abandons words and uses scratchy white lines on black pages to draw remembered moments of peace: a jar of olives, a swing, a coop full of chickens. Here—and throughout—Abirached shares (and readers feel) a loss that cannot be named. Ages 13–18.

August 1, 2014

Gr 7 Up-Abirached's companion to A Game for Swallows (Graphic Universe, 2013) reveals numerous details from her childhood in Beirut during the war from 1975 to 1990 war. "I remember" is a recurring phrase and provides a personal frame of reference for the effect of war on kids. Some are simple childhood memories of Kit Kat candy bars, bad haircuts, and her father's obsession with recorded classical music. Many are exquisite visual packages of the trauma experienced by a young girl: documenting the series of bullet holes in her mother's car windshield over time, spending a night at the school when it was unsafe for the students to leave, keeping a backpack of her treasured items next to her bed, and collecting war shrapnel the way some collect rocks or seashells. When teachers discuss the ongoing inner-city tensions, only the lower halves of their bodies are visible, allowing readers to experience the event from the viewpoint of children on the playground. Most evocative are the family images: family members as playing pieces, pawns in a board game of war; holding hands as they cross the street to the "other side" of the city; the gulf between the adult author living in Paris and her family in Beirut. With her signature style of arresting graphic layouts of images in stark white and solid black, Abirached offers a pastiche of poignant memoirs from living in a strife-ridden city. Inclusion of artfully designed maps and diagrams orient the reader and provide additional perspective.-Barbara Moon, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2014
Grades 7-10 Abirached won numerous accolades for her debut, A Game for Swallows (2012), and this follow-up similarly covers her 1980s experiences in Lebanon in a series of vignettes. Each high-contrast black-and-white illustration is paired with a memory, from the mundane ( I remember giant robot cartoons ) to the profound ( I remember seeing roadblocks made from burnt-out city buses ). The blocky, naive-style pictures quietly evoke wartime fears in ways the words simply cannotbullet holes in the sides of cars, rubble in the streets, her father's eyebrows indicating increasing sadness at the heartbreaking state of a formerly vital market. Perhaps most moving, however, are the illustrations with no words at alla series of plain black pages followed by subtle black-on-white scratchboard illustrations are not paired with a memory, but the spare style, so different from the rest of the book, speaks volumes. Abirached's childlike memories altogether compose a deeply personal portrait of Beirut unlike any historical account, and for readers curious about conflict in the region, it will provide a useful, humanizing entry point.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)