After succeeding with The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, Mira Jacob wins again with this heart-warming memoir conceived from the conversations with her son.
The American author has stated in book readings that she never thought of approaching the genre of graphic memoirs, having previously been more invested in novels and short stories.
What starts as innocent questions from a son, turns into a deep revisionism on a mother's life experiences surrounding race while growing up in American society.
Jacob's memoir also depicts how she lived through historical moments like 9/11, Obama's presidential career and Trump's victory in 2016. As a woman of color and daughter of immigrant parents, Mira Jacob has lived through the dissonance between how different people experience and react to current events and the implications of it.
Mira Jacob's family structure is shaken further when her son tries to figure out what being non-white means in the eyes of society, while some seem blind to the racist incidents and messages that surround their lives.
The book Good Talk stemmed from drafts of dialogues that needed the visual representation side to show the emotional bandwidth of what was happening. Although the author chooses not to change the facial expressions much, she had to learn how to use different drawing softwares and enhance her abilities to illustrate her memoir.
Good Talk is a short read that shows a divided United States in the midst of political turmoil and reminds us to check on our judging lenses in order to coexist, understand and converse with one another.
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