Read it, you won't be sorry.

A masterful melding of words and art, this is an excellent graphic novel that tells a compelling, personal story. Bechtel evokes time, place and feeling so well and tells the story of her and her father's struggle poignantly, yet unsentimentally. I really savored this book and couldn't put it down until the end. After I finished it I kept going back to re-read sections. It's one of those books you want to give your attention to and really sink into.

thur book club graphic novel

I find myself wanting to read for the plot and to examine for the drawings. I love Alison Bechdel.

The rare graphic novel that is extremely well written.

This was perhaps the first graphic work I read that made me realize how much pictures could add to text. It's a wonderful memoir. The images really convey a great deal and enrich the work. (FWIW, I went from here to Posy Simmonds work (Gemma Bovary and Tamara Drewe)--also very good examples of the graphic form as something to be taken seriously.)

Best graphic novel I've read yet. Intense.

Fantastic graphic novel full of inter-textual relationships. Full of seemingly basic illustrations at first but Bechdel really knows when to employ detailed imagery in order to pull you into this auto-biographical retelling of her childhood and early adult life.

A twin biography of Bechdel and her father, brilliantly rendered in graphic novel form.

This was my first graphic novel and I found the experience very compelling - this from a skeptic. I am so in love with the written word and it has been decades and decades and decades (I'll stop now) since I read a comic book - and of course this is nothing like a comic book. It is hard to explain. There is just an added element which adds another dimension to the whole experience of the story. Partly it is ironic I suppose because I associate graphic images in a cartoon-strip format with light entertainment - and this is about a dysfunctional family. Highly recommended.