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Summary
Summary
" Unferth's language is sly and bitterly funny, matched in mood by Haidle's monochromatic, inkwash-style artwork, which plays up the story's whimsy as well as its sadness." - The New York Times Book Review
Daphne is willing to risk everything to get her son back. Surreal, funny and deeply affecting, I, Parrot is the tale of mother, a son, forty-two endangered parrots, and a fierce search for redemption and a "freer world."
When Daphne loses custody of her son, she is willing to do whatever it takes to get him back-even if it means enlisting the help of the wayward love of her life, a trio of housepainters, a flock of passenger pigeons, a landlady from hell, a super-sized bag of mite-killing powder, and more parrots than she knows what to do with.
I, Parrot , by acclaimed author Deb Olin Unferth with stunning illustrations by artist Elizabeth Haidle, dips into the surreal with poignancy and humor. In this riveting, funny, and tragic graphic novel, Daphne must risk everything. Her quest is ultimately a tale about civilization's decline, the heartbreak of extinction, and the redemption found in individual revolution.
"A lovingly crafted world of gray, at once complex and weightless." -Roman Muradov, author of Lost and Found
Author Notes
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of four books, including Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and Tin House . She lives in Austin, Texas.
Elizabeth Haidle is a freelance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the creative director and regular contributor at Illustoria magazine, while writing and illustrating a nonfiction graphic novel series and raising her teenage son.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Unferth (Wait Till You See Me Dance, Revolution) dexterously juggles pathos and humor in her debut graphic novel, an intimate and contemplative reflection on the slow revelatory dawning of what it means to care for something-or someone. Taking care of birds should be easy, right? Daphne's desperate for a steady job and income so she can gain custody of her beloved son, Noah, but she didn't expect to be overseeing 42 rare parrots, three existential house painters (all named Lee Anthony), an infestation of bird mites, and the judgmental parrot care guidebook that gives this graphic novel its title. Haidle's artwork is a revelation: her exaggerated cartoon people (and almost-photorealistic parrots) are fluid and natural. But it's her layouts that provoke and enthrall: trains of thought portrayed in puffy, round flowchart balloons, short staccato panels on a single page transforming into time-lapse montages, and Daphne's dreams spreading from dark black clouds of flying birds into white, unbordered freedom. It's unexpectedly funny, sad, scary, affirming and totally engrossing. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Down-on-her-luck Daphne is trying to prove she's a fit parent for her young son, Noah, in this winningly surreal collaboration between Unferth (Wait Till You See Me Dance, 2017) and illustrator Haidle. Standing in Daphne's way are her ex-husband and his bitchy wife, her loving but not-so-great-on-paper boyfriend, Laker, and the 42 parrots she's just been put in charge of. Oh, and a massive, itchy case of parrot mites. Daphne's watching the chatty birds while their owner, her boss, who makes positive-reinforcement self-help recordings, is out of town. If Noah's dad or Daphne's boss, whom she calls the moon, finds out about the mites, it'll be curtains for her. And then things get worse. For her first work in comics, Unferth impresses with strong characterizations and a tightrope tragicomic tone. Haidle's spare, cartoony, Mary Blair-ish illustrations, impressively rendered in grayscale especially the 20 different species of parrots and the characters' permanent, rosy blush and her retro-futuristic, all-caps style perfectly complement the colorful, off-kilter tale of a woman redirecting the sails of her story.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR 44 YEARS, Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy" was the most meat-and-potatoes strip on the funnies page, a streamlined and glistening machine for delivering one dopey gag every day, no more and no less. "Dumb it down" was one of Bushmiller's mottos; in practice, as Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden point out, that meant applying the sizable arsenal of his craft to making sure every mark in each strip served its central joke. Their book how to read nancy (Fantagraphics, paper, $29.99) is a comprehensive, scholarly and intensely goofy dissertation on a single daily "Nancy" strip from 1959, in which Nancy's pal Sluggo is spritzing people with a water pistol and growling "draw, you varmint," while she prepares to blast him with a garden hose. The core of the book is a 44-part analysis of each individual element of that strip and the artistic considerations behind it, from the way Sluggo's cap interrupts the contour of his final word balloon to the precise number of droplets emerging from a water spigot (four): "When these drips are taken together with the previous panel's spritzes, a mental image is constructed of Sluggo demolished in a fulsome blast of liquid comeuppance." Karasik and Newgarden augment their argument with extensive historical context for that August morning's "Nancy" strip. The book features an illustrated biography of Bushmiller, explaining how he took over Larry Whittington's feature "Fritzi Ritz" in 1925, and how Fritzi's frizzy-haired niece Nancy, introduced in 1933, got the strip renamed after her five years later. One of many appendixes is an extended history of the "water hose" gag from its origins in belle epoque Parisian cartoons through its appearance in an early Louis Lumiere film; another one catalogs other "Nancy" strips with similar elements. And the late Jerry Lewis, of all people, supplies a four-sentence foreword - as in Bushmiller's art, the gesture alone makes it funny. A nearly-400-page graphic memoir by a 21-year-old seems like a dicey proposition - not least because most cartoonists take years or decades to develop their voice - but Tillie Walden's SPINNING (First Second, paper, $17.99) IS an engrossing, gorgeously quiet look back at the 12 years she devoted to figure and synchronized skating. It's also her fourth book, remarkably. Walden touches on the physical control the sport requires and on the rivalries and camaraderie of young skaters, but she's more concerned with evoking the feeling of being a skater: the chill of earlymorning wake-ups (she recalls sleeping on top of her blankets so that she'd be cold already by the time she arrived at practice), the openness above the ice in an empty rink, the long stretches of waiting punctuated by brief flashes of performance. "Spinning" gradually reveals itself as a coming-out story, too. "A teacher's aide had shown me how to hold your sleeve when you put your jacket on," Walden writes. "1 still remember her hands on my shoulders. 1 didn't have a word to describe it yet, but in that moment 1 knew." When she meets her first girlfriend, we see them nervously watching a video on "how to kiss a girl" together. Walden evokes emotional states with elegantly composed panels: minimal, tentative lines, more delicate than a blade's, surrounded by bold swatches of negative space. (The entire book is printed in a chilly dark purple ink, except for a few passages in which a solid, pale yellow stands in for sunlight or electric light.) After a sexual assault, she finds herself drifting through life for a while, and the narrative shifts to disconnected, full-page images. Later, a crucial competition appears as a fusillade of little panels, with tiny drawings of Walden in motion alternating with transcriptions of her fragmented thoughts. The premise of Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss's 4 KIDS WALK INTO A BANK (Black Mask, paper, $14.99) IS delICIOUSIy twisted: A smart, angry 12-year-old girl named Paige discovers that her father's former criminal associates are forcing him to help them rob a bank, and decides to save him by robbing it herself first, with the aid of her three role-playing game buddies. But the story is mostly a showcase for Rosenberg and Boss's Looney Times formalism, from its Saul Bass-style cover design onward. Characters are introduced with captions detailing their stats ("Getaway driver with an 85 percent success rate. +2 Dexterity") ; action scenes are drawn as diagrams, and conversations as RPG fantasies; the sound effects for a pair of handcuffs closing and opening are "BUSTED" and "UNBUSTED." For every experiment that works, there's one that flops, which still leaves three or four successes on any given page. All of that fun, though, is in the service of the sucker punch tonal shifts that arrive whenever "4 Kids" seems to be going in a predictable direction. This is a tragedy trying to avoid recognition by wearing a disposable comedy mask. Paige thinks she's in an I-love-it-when-a-plancomes-together heist story, but she's actually in an everything-goes-horribly-wrong heist story. And her friends, having grown up on tales where plucky kids can play detective (or criminal) and save the day, aren't prepared for what happens when blood starts flowing. A very different sort of story of youth derailed, the Australian artist Campbell Whyte's exuberant debut graphic novel, home time (Top Shelf, $24.99), turns "magical realm" tropes inside out. It begins as a vacation romp, with a cluster of half a dozen friends hanging out during their last summer before high school. Then the story takes a sharp turn: The kids fall into a river, and emerge in a seemingly utopian fantasy land, populated by tiny, cheery, treehousedwelling peach people who regard them as divine spirits and induct them into their culture. Mostly, that involves brewing artisanal teas, singing cute little songs about stasis and contentment, and persuading plants to grow into useful shapes. (Oh, and also not venturing beyond the wall that's supposedly there to keep out predators.) It's a richly imagined world, and Whyte immerses readers in it - every so often, the plot pauses for a few pages so he can silently survey the flora, fauna and habitats of a particular area, or explicate some aspect of peach civilization. At first, the kids are desperate to figure out what, exactly, their role in this sugar-buzz "My Little Pony" scenario is supposed to be, and to get back to the real world. As the months pass, though, they acclimate to the peaches' way of life, and find themselves beginning to forget their old reality, until an abrupt ending suggests that a future volume will bring them home, or at least give them a new perspective. (The story gently implies that this isn't the sort of paradise you can come back from.) Whyte draws the early "real-world" section as pencil sketches with a pale sepia tint behind them, and adopts different full-spectrum techniques for the sequences focusing on each of the human youths in the Forest of the Peaches: the flat-colored line drawings of animation cels, the crinkly 8-bit pixelations of old "Legend of Zelda" games, and finally blended paint-on-canvas tones. If "Home Time" hints at a "Peter Pan" situation, the WENDY PROJECT (Super Genius, paper, $12.99), by the writer Melissa Jane Osborne and the artist Veronica Fish, explicitly spells one out, with a similar visual approach. Wendy Davies, 16 years old, was behind the wheel for an accident in which she lost her brother Michael, and his body hasn't been found. Tormented by guilt, she can't bring herself to admit that he's dead, and retreats into a fantasy in which he's been spirited away to J.M. Barrie's Neverland, drawing her visions in a notebook given to her by her therapist. Fish draws Wendy's actual surroundings in jagged, splintery black lines and gray wash. Wherever the "Peter Pan" fantasy turns up, though, her artwork blooms into color, suffusing Wendy's dreams of Neverland and tinging the elements of the real world that she's charged with her hopeful imaginings. Osborne doesn't quite pull off the grand statement about grief and creativity that her story seems to be attempting to make, but Fish's inventive, dramatic staging is striking in its own right. The Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust's first graphic novel, "Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life," was autobiographical; her second couldn't be much less so. voices IN THE DARK (New York Review Comics, paper, $29.95) IS Lust's controlled, eccentric adaptation of a 1995 German novel by Marcel Beyer (published in English as "The Karnau Tapes") about the collapse of the Nazi regime and the willful ignorance on which it fed. As with Beyer's novel, it alternates the points of view of Hermann Karnau, a (fictional) sound-recording engineer in World War Il-era Germany, and Helga, the oldest of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels's six children (their last name, coyly, never appears in the text itself). Karnau is fascinated with recording and studying human voices, and with collecting curious examples on reelto-reel tapes and shellac discs: "This here, open vowels impinging on gutturals, is a youngster in his death throes losing all vocal control." His is a pseudoscientific curiosity untempered by any moral concerns; that makes him useful to Goebbels, whose inner circle he joins. (As we eventually learn, despite his constant bloviations about the meaning of voice, Karnau doesn't even understand the full range of sound all that well.) His young friend Helga, on the other hand, is too sheltered to grasp what's going on around her - although she's beginning to get a sense of it in the second half of the book, which largely takes place in the last 10 days of her life, in Hitler's bunker in the spring of 1945. Lust counterposes the children's genteel hiking trips and war games with the atrocities Karnau dispassionately documents, drawing both narrators' segments to emphasize visual details over their context. Bodies are seen so close up that they become abstract masses of lines, like Lust's renderings of acoustic phenomena; faces are flattened into grotesque caricatures; scenes are half-obscured by tints that change from section to section - rusty purple, rusty orange, rusty green. THE HUNTING ACCIDENT: A True Story of Crime and Poetry (First Second, $34.99), written by David L. Carlson and drawn with graphomaniacal fervor by Landis Blair, begins with a lengthy feint: It purports at first to be about the relationship between its narrator, Charlie Rizzo, a young Chicagoan in the late 1950s who's gotten in trouble with the law, and his blind, literature-loving father, Matt. Nearly a hundred pages in, it turns out to be something else entirely: the story of Matt Rizzo's extraordinary turnaround. An eighth-grade dropout blinded in an armed robbery he helped commit, he was sent to Illinois's Stateville Prison in 1936, and shared a cell with Nathan Leopold - the upperclass thrill-killer whose murderous partnership with Richard Loeb had been a media sensation a decade earlier. Rizzo wanted only to die, so Leopold made an unlikely deal with him: If Rizzo would learn Braille and read Dante's "Inferno," Leopold would help him commit suicide. The elder Rizzo was, naturally, saved by his newly developed passion for literature, going on to become an enthusiastic if unpublished writer. The lengthy prison drama he narrates to Charlie builds to a climax with suspiciously tidy symbolism, involving a burning library and a ceiling that opens to reveal the sky. The chief pleasure of this book, though, is Blair's artwork, which slathers on patterns, scribbles and frantically detailed cross-hatching of various densities, with only a few flashes of light to breathe air into most pages. (A few entr'actes superimpose silhouettes and blocks of Matt Rizzo's writing upon a background of Braille dots.) He crams every scene with visual metaphors and allusions: In a sequence where Leopold and Rizzo are discussing the story of Dante's damned lovers Paolo and Francesca, the killer's explanations are superimposed on images of fratricides and lovers in the style of Greek pottery, and overseen by the hulking, empty-eyed figures that represent the specters of Leopold and Loeb as Rizzo imagined them in his youth. Daphne, the narrator of Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth Haidle's I, PARROT (Black Balloon, paper, $18.95), IS not quite in hell, but she's having a purgatorial moment. The apartment where she lives with her son Noah (when she has custody of him) is "a way station where we wait until there is enough room in hell for us ... They have to expand it down there, put on an addition, get some housepainters in there to fix it up." Still raw from a divorce and trapped by an economy whose cruelty is never far from the story's surface, she's found a gig taking care of a house full of rare parrots for a "positive thought" guru who's taught them to repeat clichéd affirmations ("Practice gratitude! Caw!"). But she doesn't have much to be grateful for: She's got a mite infestation, a boyfriend who can't keep a job, and perpetual friction with her ex-husband's new wife, who's convinced that Daphne can't do anything right for Noah ("The last time he was with you he lost two pounds"). Unferth is best known as a prose fiction writer, and her language is sly and bitterly funny, matched in mood by Haidle's monochromatic, inkwash-style artwork, which plays up the story's whimsy as well as its sadness. Its characters and settings are presented as something like layered cut-paper silhouettes, and the birds who populate the book are sometimes detailed, sometimes the simplest of abstractions. The stripes of a cage's bars perpetually appear in one guise or another. Everything about the birds' presence suggests freedom, and everything about taking care of them traps Daphne a little more. Douglas WOLK is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times.
Kirkus Review
A woman finds herself when she loses 42 birds.Daphne works as an assistant to a woman who makes "positive-thought recordings," affirmative messages for people to listen to in order to "impede the roar of the unhappy mind." But she is occupied with her own unhappiness: her ex-husband and his new wife have been granted majority custody of their son, Noah. Her state doesn't get easier when she's asked to take care of her boss's 42 parrots, worth more than $100,000some of which, her son notices, are members of a supposedly extinct species. Things go amusingly awry, and she must enlist the help of her hapless but well-meaning boyfriend, Laker, as well as an unreliable team of house painters, all named Lee Anthony. Like Daphne, Laker is a recovering alcoholic, frequently unemployed, and disproportionately inclined toward bad luck. When they discover the birds are infested with mites, their efforts to rid themselves of the problem are by turns hilarious and tragic, absurd and alarming. So, too, are their efforts to regain a healthy family structure and control over their lives. Unferth (Wait Till You See Me Dance, 2017, etc.) has written a heart-wrenching, occasionally unbelievable tale of family and feathers. The illustrations, by Haidle (Mind Afire, 2013), are beautiful. They are understated and playful without sacrificing texture or creativity. Each page is inventive; never strictly confined to the traditional graphic-novel structure of boxed illustrations, Haidle allows the characters and elements to burst from between the lines. Drawn in very few strokes, styled with elegant simplicity, Daphne, Noah, and Laker are expressive, emotional, and individual.A heartbreaking and hopeful story of a woman's messy mettle. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This surprisingly ordinary tale by National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Unferth (Revolution) and artist Haidle (Illustoria magazine) tells of Daphne, a woman struggling with the loss of custody of her young son, Noah; the devolution of her romantic relationship; and her inability to keep gainful employment. As the book begins, our protagonist is bird-sitting her new boss's large colony of rare, expensive parrots. In addition to this responsibility, she must deal with Noah's terrible stepmother, bird mites, overdue rent, and an unlikely case of grand theft auto. All the bizarre struggles, particularly the fancy, vocal parrots, quickly reveal themselves as signifiers of adulthood's many discontents-checking to-do boxes, signing checks, and feigning respectability while feeling inauthentic-that Daphne feels she must do in order to hold on to the child she adores. Drawing on the parrot metaphor, wildness ultimately wins in this story, though the reality of the ensuing custody arrangement remains somewhat hazy. Haidle's accompanying illustrations, filled with beautiful birds often in flight, are shadowy and moody in a style a bit too reminiscent of the work of Brecht Evens. Verdict A promising premise complete with exotic creatures and complex conundrums becomes an overly simplified tale of self-realization, with artwork bested by more ambitious cartoonists. I, Parrot has the bones of a better story but not the meat. [See Douglas Rednour's graphic novels preview, "Comics Cross Over," LJ 6/15/17, p. 40.-Ed.]-Emilia Packard, Austin, TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
